


The Beast Below

by Accidentallytechohazardous



Series: Witch AU [4]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Implied/Referenced Abuse, M/M, Witch AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-25
Updated: 2015-09-25
Packaged: 2018-04-23 06:56:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4867400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Accidentallytechohazardous/pseuds/Accidentallytechohazardous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite his better judgement and an overprotective Witch at home, Shuuhei Hisagi joins Rangiku and Izuru on possibly the worst field trip of all time. Things are found, things are buried. Other things are unburied for better or worse.</p><p>And the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Beast Below

**Author's Note:**

> Illustration by CryingLittlePeople. Check out more amazing Bleach art and original art at cryinglittlepeople.tumblr.com!

“You’re welcome to stop touching that at any time.”

“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.”

Izuru gives Rangiku a hard, glassy stare out of the corner of his eye, pretending to be busy by facing a yellowed sheet of paper the size of a tablecloth spread out over his crossed legs as if he were carefully observing it . With the crisp, curled edges of the parchment lifting off the floor and the elaborately drawn symbols inked on, Rangiku might believe that it’s the sort of relic that hasn’t been touched for years, except for the fact that there are several recent-looking coffee-colored rings staining it. “I’m not kidding. That things probably older than the entire cathedral.”

Rangiku snorts derisively before turning back to the bronze shield that she had been in the process of taking down from the wall. “Hypocrite. If you care so much about this dusty old stuff, you might want to avoid using ancient artifacts as a personal coaster.”

“I am a dusty old artifact, therefor it’s different.” Izuru’s spine curls to arch his neck lower and closer to the parchment, brows knitting together in an unbroken line like he was looking for something that wasn’t quite there. Rangiku wouldn’t know, because she’s willing to bet that it’s a garbled mess of scribbles to anyone else in the world.

“You are nowhere near dusty and old, young man,” Rangiku’s lips turn into a deep frown, placing one foot against the stone wall as leverage. “But I like to think you’ll live long enough to get the chance, which is why I-” Pushing with her leg and throwing her weight back, the fixtures pinning the shield to the wall creaked dangerously but refused to budge- “can commandeer this triumph of outdated metalsmith technology. Man, that’s really stuck on there, isn’t it?”

“Don’t you have your own weapons? There are metalsmiths around here that I’m sure would love to hook you up.”

“The eco-no-m-y-y-y.”

“Fair enough.” Izuru replies distractedly. His eyes return to the parchment, one finger hooked into his mouth like a fish on a line so he can chew a blue fingernail. Rangiku might say that he looks anxious, but she’s seen him when she’s anxious. This is different. This is- strategic. At least she hopes it is.

Rangiku gives the shield one last half-hearted tug, and a shower of chipped bronze flutters to the floor. If Izuru doesn’t give old relics like these a functional purpose, she thinks he should at least let her take them down. That kid has no business letting these haunted old symbols clutter up his space.

She wipes some kinda dusty grime off on her shorts. “Whatcha’ got there, champ?”

“Its supposed to be a map of the tunnel network under the city I borrowed from my friends, the relics. The Church built them, so of course they had to lock the directions down under layers of code.” Izuru rubs his eye with one hand, frowning deeply as he explains. With a note that almost sounds spiteful, he adds “Normally, reading this kind of thing comes to me naturally, but our friends upstairs aren’t opening up my field of vision this time.”

Rangiku isn’t sure what it means for them that the gods aren’t exactly helping their noble quest. But the last thing either of them need right now is that doubt weighing down on their shoulders, so the knight crosses her arms with a sense of indifference. “May that just means this is something you need to do on your own.”

Not the most reassuring thing to say. Izuru’s voice is a flat, blunt strike to the head when he replies. “Yeah, sure. I’m used to that. What time are expecting our guest today?”

“Uh. Good question.” Rangiku slips her phone out of her pocket, the time flashes on the top of the screen when she slides her thumb over a very nice picture she snapped of a beautiful hydra before she beheaded and flayed it. It was a shame to kill such a gorgeous creature. Cool wallpaper, though. “Shuuhei said he’d be here at five, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to skulk around by coming early. We should head down there to meet him.”

“I just need a sec.” Izuru insists, finally dragging his gaze up to meet her’s and shows a rare glimmer of concern. “How sure are we that we won’t get another unexpected guest?”

Rangiku resists anything too telling that might reveal the depth of the fury that dwells within her at basically all times, turning on her heel and already starting for the door. “Shuuhei said that he’d shake Renji off, but I dunno how much he can guarantee. Renji’s been… tenacious, lately. A pain in the ass. Its not worth worrying about at this point.”

Not looking at him, Rangiku can’t tell if Izuru is relieved or worried or disappointed. She doesn’t want to know just yet.

Rangiku doesn’t need a guide around this cathedral, going up and down the banisters and around each twisty turn-ways by herself. She’s been here almost as long as Izuru has, and she’s a fair bit more slippery. She knows which stair to skip on the way down, metal case moaning unhappily underneath her and the bottom of her shoe skidding against stone tile. She knows every footfall underneath her, every step of the way.

-

Warmer weather is rolling in, and the year is at a point where certain problems can’t be covered up with an upturned collar and very heavy wool scarf anymore. The heart of the Cathedral has a few stray worshippers, idling around the candles or praying to the gods in the pews, and Rangiku can still pick Shuuhei out on sight by the grace that he’s the only one wearing such a heavy jacket with the collar turned up. The same one he wore his first time to this church, in fact, all plasticy faux-leather with the elbows worn down.

“Hey there, Tall, Dark and Handsome.” Rangiku’s voice sings above the tense silence of the church hall, delightedly ignoring the glare of an older couple as she marches towards Shuuhei. He looks at her with a predictably startled expression at being made a source of attention. “Izuru’s waiting for us upstairs. C’mon, before he dozes off.”

“I didn’t know there were gonna be people here.” Shuuhei says in a hushed, hissing whisper that borders on accusative, all wounded puppydog eyes leering down from above the line of his muzzle. Like she was supposed to warn him that this building is technically a public place. What a baby.

“That’s what happens in a house of prayer, honey. People come to pray. They won’t bite.” Rangiku pats him on the shoulder, only a little bit of biting sarcasm in her tone, and starts leading him by the sleeve to the door. “You should only be so lucky. This place used to be packed when Izuru would to do public sermons and stuff.”

“Kira used to go out in public?”

“Well, he wasn’t great at it.” Rangiku tosses a hand over her shoulder as she blusters him down the hall.

“Sure.” Shuuhei’s heels drag a little, making Rangiku have to pull him around. She shouldn’t be surprised- even if Shuuhei has been up this way before, his instincts and Witch affiliations must have something against going into dark, spooky hallways.

They’re on their way up the spiral staircase, Rangiku’s sneakers slapping against metal and Shuuhei’s boots clanging. “So…” He starts, in a way that isn’t at all very insuspicious. “This Kira. You’ve known him for a while, right?”

“Such an assumption to say!” Rangiku does a daring leap up two stairs and very gracefully does not fall and crack her head on the step below her. “Can you tell?”

“Sort of. Mostly, I just assumed because I haven’t met anyone else you’re friendly with.” Shuuhei answers, and he sounds so genuine about it she almost considers it sweet somehow.

Rangiku looks over her shoulder down at him, arms tucked behind her back. Shuuhei looks very nervous climbing the rickety old metal stairs, fingers cautiously sliding up the rail and eyebrows tense. Or perhaps its just her. “What if I don’t have any friends? Could be that I’m just a lone badass, tumbling into town and helping the local rubes out of the goodness of my dedicated heart?”

“I mean-” Shuuhei cocks his head to the side and cocks a brow under his bangs. “That’d be cool, but also kind of sad.”

She would have to agree with him on that one. Rangiku’s done this heroic knight business for a while, all armor and chivalry and good old-fashioned bloodsport. Most warriors she’s run into who do their own shtick without a team on hand aren’t as romantic as people want to make them out to be, just lonely and crusty and in sore need of a shower. Rangiku has never really been on her own. That was just a matter of survival. “You’ve got a point, there.”

“So you have known this guy for a while, then.” Shuuhei pushes, and not for the first time Rangiku marvels at the fact that she has to be surrounded by boys who think they’re just so smart.

“Yes, Mr. Nosy-Pants. I’ve known Izuru since he was just a low-level priest working in this same building. Oh, he was practically just a baby then...” Rangiku stopped suddenly, hand on chest and forcing Shuuhei to halt and narrowly avoid running into her. “Well. He was, like, eighteen. Still.”

Shuuhei jabs her calf to get her moving again before asking. “Was he always like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like this-” Rangiku hears the faint sound of sleeves flapping and turns around so she can properly see Shuuhei gesticulating wildly towards their surroundings. “Like this. This place and everything.”

“Nobody’s the same as they were years ago, I don’t even get what you’re trying to ask.” Rangiku answers, but she does get it. And also guesses that it’d be hard to explain, who that kid was and what happened. Her foot comes off the iron staircase and onto solid tile. “Look. We’re just down this turn over here.”

Its only been a few moments since Rangiku went down to get Shuuhei, and Izuru didn’t seem incredibly motivated to move from the floor when she left. So she’s a little surprised to see that when they enter Izuru’s confessional, he’s dragged the coffee table away from the couch to the center. The map he was losing a staring match to has been spread over the table’s surface, corner edges draping down and rolling up on the floor.

“Hey.” Izuru waves one hand vacantly and tries to keep the map from sliding off the coffee table with the other.

“Sup.” Shuuhei points a finger at the parchment, wearing the same kind of ‘just roll with it’ face that Rangiku sees him use when Renji pulls out weird Witch shit all the time. “What’s all this happening here?”  
Before Izuru can answer, Rangiku replies immediately. “That’s his map. The Church has catacombs under the city because it’s founders were a bunch of creeps and now we gotta figure out a way to go down there without dying.”

“Oh, right.” Shuuhei nodded sagely. “Because they’re haunted. Catacombs are always haunted.”

“Yeah, probably because they’re haunted. But not that haunted. Right, Izuru?” Rangiku turns towards the Prophet expectantly, hands on her hips.

Izuru takes the time to helpfully say with the utmost confidence and wisdom. “Its definitely super-duper haunted.”

“Catacombs are always haunted, dude.”

Thanks, Izuru. Rangiku takes a moment to put her hand to her brow, very quickly counting backwards from five before verbalizing. “Of course we took into account, when we were making this plan in its wee baby infant stages, that I can’t kill a ghost. My sword doesn’t work on that kinda spooky nonsense.”

“I’m sure there will be plenty of killable things for you down there. My predecessors wouldn’t be anything but annoyingly thorough when it came to guarding their secrets.” Izuru assures her, tone taking a hard edge when he says ‘my predecessors’. “But we can’t worry about that first. The most immediate concern is getting into the catacombs in the first place.”

Izuru taps one blue finger onto the parchment, forcing Rangiku and Shuuhei to lean in and catch what he’s pointing at. It looks, to Rangiku, very much like a completely indecipherable nonsense-symbol. Probably that code that Izuru was talking about. “This represents our starting point. Where we enter and, in theory, leave the tunnels. The tunnels go everywhere under the city, getting mixed up with the more modern sewage systems to make it extra confusing. The closer we stay to this point, the easier it will be to get in and out.” He finishes by giving both of them a wary, warning glance peeking from under his heavy lids. “So no wandering off unless you really need to.”

“Are you telling me that so I can remind you later about your own advice?” Rangiku quirks her lip.

Izuru wisely decides not to rise to the bait, continuing on. “We don’t know exactly what’s down there. The Prophets before me did a very good job keeping it private, using the hauntings and religious superstition to keep people away, so we can only guess what we might run into.”

“Aside from the usual, underground-tunnel-dwelling things?” Shuuhei suggests smugly, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Renji and I have exterminated hundreds of creatures that normal humans can’t handle- “No offense.” He adds the last bit to Rangiku with a tone that’s once again just a touch too sincere, earning a certainly very not at all offended jab in the ribs.

Drawing her arm back and ignoring Shuuhei’s indignant squawk of pain, Rangiku reports, “I can get some friends of mine to guard the entrance. To make sure nothing follows us down or up that we don’t know about. If there’s really anything beyond the usual level of creepy that we disturb, its probably something we don’t want getting out into the streets.”

“You have other friends?” Shuuhei wheezes, then shuffles away and glares with a hurt expression when Rangiku pulls her arm back again.

Izuru looks unsure, placid expression faltering with a deeper crease in his eyebrows and a frown pulling on his thin lips. Rangiku knows he can’t be too excited about widening this circle more than it needs to be. This is a private matter, that has to be privately cleaned up. By both Izuru and Rangiku. They both know that.

Which draws Rangiku to question why Shuuhei is even here in the first place. She hopes, fruitlessly, that its for a logical and completely realistic reason. And not the kind of reason that immediately flies to her mind when she thinks of why Izuru would reach out like he has been doing lately.

The sound of Izuru’s voice draws her back to the here and now, settling on “That’s fine, I guess.”

“Perfect!” Rangiku counters his unsureness with a toothy grin and an over dramatic double-thumbs up. “Meeting adjourned?”

“Yeah, sure.” Izuru leans down to start rolling up the big map. It looks like a chore that’s going to take a while. “I’ll let you know when I’ve decided on a date, and you can tell Hisagi.”

“This planning session didn’t really have a lot of planning.” Shuuhei points out, but is immediately waved off by Rangiku.

“There’s not a lot to plan. This is more like a recon mission, not a battle strategy.” Rangiku assures him, with a much less assuring comment of “Ideally.” Tacked on by Izuru. Thanks, buddy.

He does have a point, though. This quest could be pretty weird, and they’re basically jumping in feet-first. Rangiku has been in tight situations before, but she can’t slice or charm her way out of an underground tunnel.

The best thing a Knight can do is to be braced for the worst. The best thing a strategist can do is have a plan for the worst. A friend told her that, once. Rangiku scratches her cheek.

“I’ll send a message to my guy at the Cohorts.” Rangiku decides, mentally running through the best way to ask for such a suspicious favor through innocuous text messages. The bond between Knights is supposed to be one like no other, and she’s careful about the allies she makes. But she’s been wrong before. “Shuuhei should head back to the wagon. We need to make sure that Renji doesn’t catch on that anything weird is going on, and the best way to do that is to reassure him that Shuuhei will be close by his side.”

Even before she finishes that statement, Rangiku knows it was the wrong way to phrase it. Shuuhei isn’t the easiest kid to read, but she can guess that putting it in those terms makes it sound too much like they’re plotting a betrayal.

Which is dumb, because they really aren’t. Renji being prideful and defensive doesn’t do anything to help anybody.

“What about you?” Shuuhei turns on her. No doubt, he’s thinking about the fact that she’s been spending a lot less time around Renji since the last encounter in the Cathedral. Not that she’s being rude about it. Things are just… tense. Rangiku’s not sure she wants to be around a kid with more hexes and magic tricks up his sleeve than he really needs and make herself all jittery with trying to keep a secret.

“What about me?”

“Wouldn’t that be better for our cover?” He’s pushing her, she can tell. Turning those dark eyes on her and sulking through his shark-toothed maw. “Look, I’m well-aware Renji overreacted. Big-time overreacted. I’m still mad at him, too. But since he’s had time to cool off, he’s not unreasonable and if you guys can at least occupy the same room for a little bit without biting at each other then it might buy us some leeway when the two of us ‘coincidentally’ go AWOL at the same time.”

Rangiku’s about to say no. That even if she misses being on friendlier terms by now, they’re not ready and she can just stay at the Cohort HQ when Izuru pipes up a little too quickly with “That makes sense.”

“Oh, does it?”

Izuru shrugs, attempts to look unassuming, and fails so severely that even Shuuhei can pose an incredulous look. “At the very least, it’ll be good to keep another pair eyes on him. In case Abarai has any plans like going out of town or such that could affect when Shuuhei will be able to work with us.”

It sounds sketchy. But on the other hand, Rangiku doesn’t have a reason not to go. Who knows- maybe Renji will surprise her.

And maybe Rangiku will pull a magic wand out of her own sphincter and become a Witch, herself.

-

Let’s clear the air here, first of all- Rangiku never disliked Renji. Not even when he’s rude or thoughtless or arrogant. Not even when he’s kicking up a kerfuffle. She can see why Shuuhei has a soft spot for him, even if it drives her up the wall anyways. Any claims that Rangiku herself has never been patient with a very particular, bossy, and kind of perplexing supernaturally gifted individual herself would hardly stand up to scrutiny. She has, to put it frank terms, had this babysitting gig before.

There are a lot of what-ifs she could toss around. What if Renji was better at keeping his temper? What if Rangiku wasn’t so stubborn? What if, should anyone dare to imagine, Renji didn’t automatically flip his lid at the sight of Izuru and Rangiku wasn’t drawn to push his buttons like a moth battering itself into a lightbulb? Rangiku has no powers, no sight or hoity-toity special abilities, so of course she’ll never know. That’s what you get for being plain old human.

But in the vast collection of alternate universes that Rangiku cares to stew on, the one where Rangiku and Shuuhei let themselves into Renji’s matchbox of a mobile home the Witch’s needle-pin eyes don’t fall right through her and onto Shuuhei with telescopic focus is probably the most difficult to imagine. He revolves around Shuuhei like a hollow moon.

But nobody has ever ignored Rangiku before, and by the grace of gods they never will. Her arms nearly sweep aside a bookshelf when she announces “Honey I’m home!” while Shuuhei kicks his shoes into the corner.

“How’s town?” Renji says, and Rangiku is gratified that he looks vaguely surprised to see her, all wide eyes and forgetting to put the gravelly attitude in his voice. Understandably, since Rangiku’s been bouncing around a little more these days. From Renji and Shuuhei’s place to a cot at the Cohorts to couch-surfing with friends. She’s unpredictable and its great.

Shuuhei peels off his muzzle and it makes a metallic clang when flung into a houseplant, then settles to peeling off his gross, sweaty socks. “Hot. Humid. We need to go shopping for summer clothes and working electric fans.”

“We had tons of fans last year. Get some out of storage.”

“No, we sold them in the winter to fix the furnace.” Shuuhei says and brushes damp bangs off of his forehead. “Should also think about checking out the roof before it rains. It looks kinda dodgy from the outside and I dunno how much longer the charm is gonna hold it together.”

Renji frowns and glares thoughtfully at some frozen squid-like creature that’s mounted at the wall. “I’ll make it happen.” His dark eyes slide around the room to land tentatively on Rangiku. “How good are you with a hammer?”

“As tricky as it sounds to hit one thing with another thing, I think I can manage.” Rangiku bats her eyes and lifts her hand to her bosom as if in shock. “My good sir, are you asking for the help of lil’ ole me on your precious wagon? Big strong fellar’ like you needs a lady’s touch?”

The reaction is predictable- a tight knot suddenly tying itself in between his shoulders and a belligerent scowl set on Renji’s brick-like jaw. “I gotta be on the inside doin’ the magic thing, and Shuuhei’s off working all day-” (Shuuhei adds an indignant “Who’s fault is that?”) “-I just need a body on the roof to make sure it stays together. You don’t have to. It was a stupid idea, I’ll call somebody-”

“No, I can do it.” Rangiku swipes his words away easily. She’s reminded of similar conversations she’s had helping novice knights swallowing their pride on jobs way above their paygrade. She can imagine Shuuhei and Renji in another life weighed down in steel plates with swords strapped to them, just as battered around and scraped up. “But I will be expecting a lovely dinner and bed as compensation for my hard work, seeing as you guys are already strapped for cold hard cash.”

“You’re staying the night?” Shuuhei buts in before the words can leave Renji’s mouth, looking way too pleased at the idea.

Rangiku edges her way through the wagon, drawing her fingers over the spines of hardcover books and stacks of paper and collecting dust under her nails. “I’m a lot less busy than you guys seem to think.”

Almost automatically, she glances back over her shoulder to Renji. Wondering how he will react. He can’t have forgotten how she went off at him. And he can’t forget that she hasn’t forgotten. “That is- if both the proprietors of this establishment don’t mind me bringing my girl cooties in here.”

Shuuhei’s slate-colored eyes watch her weighing down on Renji’s shoulders, pressing on him expectantly for a reaction. She’s surprised and yet not surprised that he doesn’t rise to the bait- its not only her, he has to think of. Now Shuuhei is judging him a well.

Renji leans his hip against the center table, arms crossed in a stunning display of forced nonchalance. “Of course you are. Friends are always welcome.”

He sounds sincere, but knowing that he lives with someone like Shuuhei and he’s let her stay here in the past without a second thought it must be something he’s used to saying. Rangiku has mistaken lies as genuine before. Its also not an apology, or a request for her forgiveness. Which would have been the most ideal.

But its dinner. And its her being a friend. And that’s at least a start.

She’s got a lot of work to do with that kid.

 

From the humble opinion of a local non-Witchy type like herself, Renji and Shuuhei’s place is kind of a dump from the outside. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If Renji can just magic up the inside of the place to be roomy and have space for all his knick knacks and junk, why not use the same principle to give the outside a new paint job? Or at least turn it into something more aesthetically pleasing, like a tent or quaint little log cabin.

The roof shingles creak ominously under her ass when she pushes back her weight, sneakers gripping for traction. A rust-flaked hammer is gripped in one fist, and some nails are held in her mouth like the teeth of an iron god that she’s gonna slap the fuck in to this woodshop project on wheels.

To be fair, the patchwork of wood is knit together surprisingly well. The little crack she can find are hardly slivers, more long than they are wide that she can’t even see through them. Rangiku wonders what she’d see if she could, whether she’d look down and catch a bird-eyes eye view of the mind-bogglingly disproportionate interior or if she’d just see an empty, non-enchanted inside of a wooden wagon. She can smell Shuuhei’s cooking wafting up through the cracks. Macaroni and cheese, the kind he likes with the breadcrumbs and broccoli.

The hammer in Rangiku’s hand slams into the nail pinched between her fingers, sealing the roof back up. As the iron staples the wood together, a familiar bolt of black static crawls out from the roof and dances over the shingles. It bounces around like a lightning storm and then zips out of existence as quickly as it entered, leaving behind a faint scent of sulphur and rust and smoke.

The clap-clap-clap of a rubber sole on wood rattles the ladder she had propped up against the wall, and because apparently ‘if you knock that over and strand me up here I will jump down and land on your face’ translates to ‘please come join me at our mutual peril’, Rangiku gets a Shuuhei hoisting himself onto the roof.

“You wanna take a break?” He suggests, and the ladder creaks dangerously under his weight. He smells strongly of baked cheese. “Dinner’s done. You wanna get in here now before Renji takes all the parmesan.”

“There’s parmesan?” The hammer’s handle slides through Rangiku’s belt loop, giving her a free hand to climb down with. She slides down over the shingles until Shuuhei catches her sneaker with a wary noise.

“Also,” Shuuhei says when they’re both wobbling and reaching for rungs with their toes down the ladder. “Thanks for being cool.”

Rangiku stops herself from asking what exactly he means. “Years of practice.”

 

A sit-down dinner at home with the family isn’t exactly one of the things you’ll find in Rangiku’s scrapbook. That whole scene- the idyllic ma and pa and 3.5 kids getting together to say thanks to their household gods, performing ceremonies and celebrating that they have each other before digging into a four-course meal. It just doesn’t work for her.

When she tries to imagine what that must be like for someone out there living a normal, conventional lifestyle, the picture doesn’t quite translate right. Like a brassy polaroid with exposure damage blurring out the faces. It doesn’t feel real.

The closest she had were dinners at the long tables with the Cohorts, which were hardly the peaceful and pleasant events that Christmas specials might recall. Other nights were spent keeping track of Izuru in the Cathedral, carefully watching his plate to see that at it was empty enough by the time he forgot it on the side table.

So she allows herself to get a little warm and fuzzy inside when Shuuhei darts back inside with a spitfire “Renji, I told you not to touch that until we got there!” and flits over to what looks like a black iron cauldron overflowing with cheesy pasta. At least for tonight.

-

“So have the thing cornered, its 4 AM and we’re all delirious from exhaustion. My buddy says ‘Come out with your hands up!’ and before I can say ‘Its a quadruped, moron!’ the unicorn opens its mouth and whole goddamn arm comes waving out- the thing swallowed our third member up like a python!”

“That’s sick!” Shuuhei’s massive tongue lolls over his teeth as he grimaces and Renji howls with laughter.

Rangiku giggles, hiccuping her way through the rest of the story and slapping Shuuhei on the shoulder to hush him up. “And then the goat- the goat just fucking trots on up-”

“I forgot about the goat!”

“Then you’re gonna love-”

She stops, mid-gesticulation, to a familiar chiming. Renji and Shuuhei give her equal expectant looks as she searches her pockets. “Phone.”

“What?”

“Phone.” The buzzing mobile slides out of her pocket, avoiding an untimely death as her fingers fumble with it over the cheese vat. The screen is lit with a picture of a familiar blond flash of hair placed in a headlock by her own arm for the picture. “Phone! Sorry guys, I gotta take this. You know, from that job thing I have?”

They both echo dramatic “Ooooooh”s, earning a swat that misses Shuuhei but manages to boff Renji’s ponytail as Rangiku gets up and leapfrogs over furniture to the front door.

Once she’s out the front door and back on the porch, she can breathe. The phone still beeps and jitters insistently, like the frantic heartbeat of a live animal. Like a timer counting down. One buzz. Two buzz. Three-

“What’s cookin’, good lookin’?”

Izuru’s voice burbles through the speaker like a firecracker exploding. “Tomorrow is our best opening. We go down tomorrow.”

Ah, of course. Job-related indeed. “That was fast.”

“Something’s come up. I looked into the future, and the future says this is our shot if we want to find anything other than dirt and bricks. If we go any later we miss our window. We have to go down tomorrow.”

“Alright, sure.” Rangiku placates him, putting on her calm and collected voice even as she pinches the bridge of her nose. “I’ll call my guy and tell Shuuhei.”

She can hear Izuru exhale into the phone, all quiet and small. “Good. Thanks.”

“I know you know what you’re doing.” She says, and its bittersweet praise.

Its their code, warning the other to be a lot more careful. And she knows what must be going through his head when he pauses before responding. “Yeah. I do.”

The call goes silent, so quickly and quietly that Rangiku waits almost a minute to make sure Izuru has actually hung-up. Her phone case is leopard print, and the screen is cracked at one edge. She minds the cracks as she pulls up her contacts list.

A mental note is made to apologize to Renji and Shuuhei that she’ll be too late to help them with the dishes. Its gonna be a long time before she goes back inside the wagon.

-

A suspicious amount of time later, Rangiku slips back inside. Even more suspicious, really, that neither of the guys came out to check on her. Not that she’s doesn’t appreciate the privacy. Shuuhei would be one case, she still has to tell him that things are moving ahead a lot more quickly than expected. But if Renji catches even the slightest scent of shenanigans, things will get complicated.

Rangiku wonders how much of head-start they have tomorrow, her sneaking off yet again with his dear Familiar and canoodling with outside forces. Depending on how early they leave and how late Renji sleeps, they could have half of the day and then chaos will break loose.

She also wonders if there are enough clues for Renji to figure out where they’re going. Its unlikely but. Y’know. Witch-y magic stuff. And the whole. Izuru thing might lead him in the right direction. She wonders a third time if he would try to follow them if he found out.

Spacious as the wagon is, its not exactly closed off. Noises spill out of where she knows the kitchen to be while she enters into the main room, the sounds of pots and dishes banging together and a loud splash accompanied by an aggravated “Fuck me.” that must be Renji spilling water all over the linoleum.

“I told you to watch the sink..”

“Well clearly I wasn’t listening!” An additional clatter, the same sulfur scent of Renji’s magic presumably handling the mess rather than expend all that energy to get the mop eight feet away. “Matsumoto’s kinda taking a while out there.”

The derisive sound of air being blown through Shuuhei’s teeth huffily. “Why, you concerned about her or something?”

“No!”

“Breaking news- shrewd businessman and emissary of the Dark Ones has a heart. I asked if you were concerned, you’re allowed to say yes.”

“You’re the one who’s close to her. I’m not the one she’s comin’ around to see.” Renji says, defensiveness stitched into his voice. “You guys are hanging out a lot lately. Think you’d know what’s up with her.”

“We don’t hang out enough for me to read her mind if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“You think you can trust her?”

Clacking of cracked dishes screeches to a halt. No sound but water dropping from the faucet to the bottom of the sink.

If Rangiku had any sense of personal boundary, she thinks, now would probably be the time to backtrack out the door and loudly announce her re-entry. Or more preferably leap out of the nearest window onto a bed of nails until she bled all this situational awkwardness out of her body.

But if she is going to burn a bridge, the ashes may as well be crushed into the dirt under her boot. And she’s halfway to interrupting with something snarky when Shuuhei beats her to the punch.

“You’re still pissy about the Cathedral thing.” Rangiku could read the disappointed sneer in Shuuhei’s voice from a mile away. “And its not just about the Church. I’ve been real patient with you and your tantrums, Abarai, but transforming me without my permission was a fresh new level of shit that I didn’t expect even you to sink down to. I didn’t keep any secrets from you about where I came from. When are you gonna buckle down and tell me exactly why I should care about your beef with Izuru Kira?”

“There’s no beef! He’s nobody!”

Rangiku expects to hear the pops and crackles of Renji’s magic, bouncing off the walls and the counter and crowding the kitchen. Something snapping and breaking under the force of Renji’s distress manifesting itself magically. But it never comes.

Instead there’s something even more alien and strange. Guilt in Renji’s voice, maybe even regret.

“I’m- I’m sorry. About that. And that I can’t explain all this shit to you.” Which is still a convenient excuse if Rangiku ever heard one. Close but no cigar, Abarai. “He’s another self-righteous dick hiding behind a power machine that keeps people in their place. You don’t know him like I know him, Shuuhei.”

“You talk like you guys used to be friends or something.”

Dead silence.

“Renji?”

“I’m too tired to think about heavy shit like this. It drags me down.” And like that, the guilt and vulnerability vanishes. Cut behind a wall slamming back into place. The sound of silverware being scraped against plastic plates and a business-like tone snaps back into action. “Go check on Matsumoto if you want to. I’m finishing this up an’ then I’m gonna go to bed.”

Well, that’s an unsurprising twist. Just as the truth was vaguely broached, it was snapped away again. Shuuhei seems to have similar feelings, and he knows better than Rangiku does that no one’s getting anything else out of Renji tonight. “Yeah. Fine. Whatever. Cryptic bullshit always wears the hell outta me, too.”

Shuuhei’s boots come into view as he rounds the corner while running a dish towel over his hands, and Rangiku’s choices come back down to either the windows or doing something semi-reasonable once again. And since the window is currently too far away to launch herself out of, she has to settle for quietly flailing her arms to get his attention.

With her arms flopping about in an unknightly fashion, Rangiku succeeds in getting Shuuhei to freeze and look at her, eyes wide with mortification. He must be calculating exactly how much she’s heard, but they have no time for gossip-revelations now.

Still in the kitchen, Renji grunts. “Shuuhei?”

The Inhuman’s gray eyes are squarely on Rangiku, brows quirked uncertainly. Praying that Shuuhei has a bare ounce of common sense to play along, Rangiku purses her lips and presses a finger to them, the universal sign for ‘keep the fuck quiet!’

Shuuhei answers back to Renji, eyes still on Rangiku. “What?”

“Thought you were gonna check on Matsumoto.”

“Yeah.” Shuuhei agrees. “I’m going outside to check on her right now.”

If nothing else, Rangiku can at least feel proud for tainting an honest, trust-filled bond. Shuuhei and Izuru were definitely right about at least one thing- Renji is not going to be happy tomorrow.

But that’s gonna be hours away, long after Rangiku types a note into her phone and holds it up for Shuuhei to silently read the screen.

‘WE MOVE TOMORROW MORNING.’

-

Mornings do not well become either Rangiku or Shuuhei. Bright and early at about 5 AM, she has to drag the kid out of bed and down a ladder to get him moving, then lure him outside with a thermos of what may or may not be coffee mixed with red bull.

But no matter how dead inside they may be, its nothing compared to Renji if that snoring is anything to go by.

“His internal clock has been fucked for years. Sleeps until, like, noon.” Shuuhei explains once he’s caffeinated. “Plus, I put a lot of sedatives in his tea.”

Rangiku wants to ask what’s going to happen when Renji wakes up. Not just during the mission, but later. And what Izuru is going to do about that when the time comes. If he’s going to do anything about that. But she doesn’t

They buy supplies on the way over, Rangiku hoisting a backpack full of flashlight batteries and medical tape and water bottles onto the convenience store counter while a sleepy teenager gives her an ireful look before whipping out the price-scanner. Shuuhei shifts his weight from foot to foot next to her, looming like a big black crow as he marinates in his heavy jacket done up to the collar over his face. They walk down to the Cathedral together, and the soft morning sunlight glares against his shoulders like gold fire.

Rangiku yanks on the back of his jacket before Shuuhei can trot up the big steps to the Cathedral doors, dragging him off to the side by his throat. With a patient voice as he is being hauled, the kid asks “So where we goin’?”

“Oh, we’re here.” Rangiku promises, rounding the corner of the huge building through the lush, viney bushes. “Just using the side entrance. My guy’ll be here. I think you’ll like him.”

The Cathedral is imposing enough from the front entrance, cyclops eye hanging on the huge wall and all. But its a little less graceful from the backside, all thorny brush and overgrown ivy creeping up the stones like huge fistfulls of bricks in a dark, unkempt and cramped courtyard. The grass crunches like kindling under Rangiku’s sneakers, pushing aside weeds until she seems a familiar lanky stance dutifully waiting in position.

He’s a gangly drink of water, even weighed down in lightweight armor and a butcher’s knife of a sword strapped to his back. The shock of orange spiky hair is matched in harshness of the eyes only by the red banner tied to his hip.

“Shuuhei,” Rangiku announces, dropping the Inhuman back on his feet and gesturing grandly. “This is Ichigo. He’s a knight, like me!”

The younger knight’s metal boots clang noisily as he trots over to them, big brown eyes nailed to Rangiku with baited anticipation and his lips pinned to a neutral, expectant expression. Which is something that Rangiku knows is reserved for her, and spares her from the default scowl she’d otherwise be receiving.

“Matsumoto.” Ichigo raises his hand in greeting, and chainmail rattles on his arm like rain on a roof. He was a good choice for cover. Young, strong, and of all the knights in the cohort he’s not the most difficult to get in full uniform.

“Hey, kid.” Rangiku’s eyes go from the teenager to Shuuhei. “Ichigo and some of his friends are gonna be patrolling the area, in case someone tries to follow us down. Or we, y’know, don’t come back up in a few days.”

“That was a serious concern?”

“Ichigo. This is Shuuhei, the guy I told you about.”

Understanding lights his eyes up brassy, and Ichigo’s gaze goes to a wary Shuuhei. He points towards him obviously through thick gloves. “Yeah, yeah. The Inhuman, right?”

The words sink into Shuuhei like a bullet, eyes narrowing into steel slits and spine tensing dangerously. Under his jacket, Rangiku can imagine his teeth bared as if ready to snap. His fingers wrap around his collar like coiled claws. “Do I know you?”

“Its okay.” Rangiku smiles in a way she hopes induces reassurance. “Ichigo is cool. Right?”

The kid scoffs without humor, a scathingly dry sound. “Yeah. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna blab.” His padded fingers comb through a messy tangle of orange spikes, pushing them back from his tanned brow.

For a dangerously hesitant second there’s nothing, just the smooth face of an eighteen year old boy. Just long enough for Rangiku to desperately pray to every god she knows that she hadn’t made a trust-shattering mistake.

The tension breaks when the skin on Ichigo’s forehead begins to crawl, pulling away like fabric being ripped at the seams. Two lines emerge above Ichigo’s eyebrows, then those two pull apart over a pair of glassy orbs. Narrow black slits of pupils roll around in pools of sickly yellow before shrinking into focus, reptilian eyes hovering above human dark brown ones.

“Oh.” Shuuhei says flatly, his gaze taking turns hovering on all four of Ichigo’s eyes. “Goddamn.”

“Y’know, a picture will last longer.” Ichigo frowns and raises an eyebrow, which does interesting things to the right half of his face. Rangiku can imagine a little bit of what Shuuhei must be thinking right now, from when she first found out about Ichigo’s ‘breed’. How when Ichigo’s throat stretches, it'll be a little easier to see the beginning of soft scales trailing underneath his clothing. Maybe even wondering if those gloves on his fingers might be thick enough to cover something sharp underneath. “What? Never seen another Inhuman before or something?”

That seems to jar Shuuhei, shaking him into looking caged and mulish like he does whenever he’s put on the spot. “Yeah, no.” He trips over his words, over-pronouncing them like he’s trying to be extra conscious of his teeth. “There’s not exactly a lot running around.”

Ichigo’s armor shifts when he shrugs, both sets of eyes wandering off into the street. If Rangiku didn’t know the kid, she’d almost think he was nervous. “True. At least not in broad daylight, anyways. Civilians aren’t real suspicious of Knights.”

“The Cohorts though, man? Isn’t that kind of risky?”

Ichigo softens, if only ever so slightly. He looks painfully young when his lips twitch upwards at the corner of his mouth. “Hey, its my gig. And its a lot easier when you have people on the inside keeping an eye on things. I take care of myself.”

That is Rangiku’s cue, as the most adulty adult here, to step in and be all suave reassuring. “Yeah, of course you do! Ichigo’s one of the best Knights you can get your hands on, present company excluded. He’s got our backs for this mission.” Though he looks suspiciously alone right now. “You have our backs, right?”

Ichigo’s upper pair of eyes squeeze close, skin rushing back in as the eyeholes skin back into his skull like sand in a sinkhole. His lower set returns to looking back and forth down the street warily. “After you go down, the other knights will fall in and surround the place. Didn’t really tell them exactly what’s going on, but they know its an inside job andfor one of our own, so they’re on board. If it were me, I still wouldn’t take too long.”

A thumb is jabbed towards the cathedral walls. “The skinny guy- the Prophet is already waiting for you by the cellar doors. Dunno how he’s managing to get all the locks and curses undone by himself.”

“He’s quirky like that.” Rangiku beams and puts her hands on Ichigo’s arms, briefly enjoying the feeling of armor in her hands. Its been a long since since she got suited up. “I owe you a big one.”

“If you say so.” Ichigo is a dutiful good boy and Rangiku is buying him something very nice and shiny once Izuru pays her for helping him out all the live-long day.

The Prophet in question looks predictably underdressed for a cave-exploring adventure. The black hood that Rangiku has given up all hope on trying to replace shows them his back as he sits patiently at what appears to be a square tunnel at the building’s base that goes directly down into the dark musty earth. His spidery legs dangle over the edge.

Something crunches metallically under Rangiku’s shoe- it turns out to be a broken padlock. Various bits of metal, chains and latin inscriptions stamped into metal are scattered in the grass like flecks of snow. Someone has been busy.

Izuru’s cranes around to face then, and Rangiku can’t help but notice a distinct lack of any kind of survival gear on his person. “Your tall friend is… nice.” That encounter must have been interesting.

“Yes. He is.” Rangiku agrees, tugging the straps on her backpack as if she were to embark on a school field trip. Technically, it is a field trip of sorts. “And he’s got our backs for the next thirty hours, if we’re lucky-”

“-But no promises about Renji and his crew after five.” Shuuhei points out.

Her smile tenses. “Right. So are we ready to go?”

“As we can be.” Izuru says in a way that really isn’t very reassuring. His pallid face switches from them back towards the pit at their feet swallowing his legs. If Rangiku looks over his shoulders, she can see a brick-and-mortar tunnel, around dark cement stairs going underneath the church building.

“This is our entrance into the catacombs.” The Prophet explains. “The founders of this cathedral dug them hundreds of years ago. Its pretty deep below, so we’ll be going down for a while until we find anything.”

“Yeah, about that.” Shuuhei says, the toe of his boots curl over the lip of the hole. “Do we know what we’re looking for yet?”

“Whatever we’re not supposed to find.” Izuru sets his feet on the first step, and slides to stand. He’s about a foot shorter with both feet in the darkness, looking from Rangiku to Shuuhei with a swiveling gaze. “But trust me, we’ll know it when we see it.”

Shuuhei looks like he has something decidedly negative to say about that, but Rangiku presents him with one of two flashlights from her bag and juts her chin towards the stairs insistently.

There’s no use wasting time now

-

Rangiku is certainly not by any means a neat-freak. Quite frankly, on the list of important things to do, a person only has so much energy and motivation for so many things. And Rangiku’s list goes on for a long time before ‘tidying up’ takes priority.

However, Rangiku has also never built an enormous spiraling basement that goes directly under the city, and is inclined to believe that if she had, she might care to rub some antibacterial soap over it every once in a while.

In a truly regrettable mistake, Rangiku rolls the reach of her light down the stairs and is blessed with a generous eye-full of mold and puddles from the dripping leaks on the cave like ceiling. “Ew.” Taking a few experimental steps down the stairs, she thoughtless places her hand on the wall for balance. Her palm comes away wet and dark.

“Have you ever been down here before?” The voice comes from Shuuhei as the yellow shine from his light skates down levels of staircases.

Izuru trudges ahead of them, hands in his jacket pockets and the sharp edges of his shoulders stooping with every massive step. “A bit. I wasn’t allowed very deep below, though. By the time I became a Prophet, the place was off-limits and considered a safety hazard to anyone who entered.”

“Oh.” Shuuhei’s boots slap against the stairs after him. “Just checking. So why were you here before?”

Rangiku can practically hear the gears turning in Izuru’s head, though if you weren’t her you probably wouldn’t notice it. He looks like a dark shadow when the flashlight bounces off of him. An anti-ghost.

“Spring cleaning.” The Prophet explains, and doesn’t turn his face back to look at them. “After the last Prophet went out and I came in, we had a lot of useless and pretty offensive junk cluttering up the place. This is basically the biggest empty storage space in the city, so its kind of a graveyard of the Church’s stuff.”

Under his hood, Izuru’s head rolls to the side thoughtfully. “At least as far as I’ve been down.”

“Izuru’s pretty unique, even for a Prophet.” Rangiku adds, with no small amount of pride as she hops over a few steps to stride ahead. She doesn’t even trip once. But she should not do that again. “Syndicates of the Church used to be a lot more conservative around here, y’know. Izuru changed a lot of policies to be way less scary.”

“Someone should have told Renji.” Shuuhei snorts, and Rangiku can catch the blue of Izuru’s eyes flash at him in the dark for less than a second before sliding back ahead. She thinks he might retort back with something dangerously snarky, but instead he just gives them a belated “Watch your step.”

Before Rangiku can ask why Izuru’s future-seeing powers can’t possibly be a little more useful or even in any way convenient, the stairs level out to flat floor underneath her and she barely avoids stumbling. Even standing still, her balance feels off-kilter, and she has to reach out and find Shuuhei’s sleeve for balance. “That was way faster than I expected.”

“We can’t possibly be at the bottom yet, can we?” Shuuhei agrees.

“The tunnels incline down from here.” Izuru explains, and his face stands out against the dark tunnel like a cat’s eye. Stupid fancy magic person powers.

Shuuhei, to Rangiku’s chagrin and against the logic of every scary story ever told, wanders away from her grasp, boots noisily pointing against the floor. “The walls are wider, too.”

“That’s a good sign. It means we’re getting closer to the storage space.”

Rangiku’s sneakers slide over the floor as she strides ahead, clearing a path ahead with the glow of her flashlight. Izuru and Shuuhei’s footsteps file into line behind her. “So… you’ve been spelunking around here before. The Cathedral wasn’t big and spooky enough on its own?”

She knows better than to try and listen for Izuru, anything louder than footsteps. Than his soft shoes scraping over moldy stone, but as a survivalist Rangiku can’t help herself. A mental note is made to remind Izuru to rustle around his jacket a little more.

“Its exactly like Matsumoto and I said. When I became the Prophet of the Cathedral, a lot of old artifacts in the building became obsolete and culturally insensitive. I’m actually surprised you wouldn’t know about it before.”

Shuuhei’s voice bounces around and his light brushes the corner of Rangiku’s vision, she can perfectly visualize him trying to look around and absorb the halls with his eyes. She’s seen him wrestle a creature five times his size, snap those monstrous chompers of his down hard enough to reach bone. The only other person she’s ever seen with that physics-breaking level of strength is Ichigo. Reasonable to wonder what else that kid can do.

“Yeah, I’ve been off the map for a while.” Shuuhei replies to Izuru, and his voice is dull like its a quirky little line he’s practiced. “Living under a rock, sorta. You keep saying you ‘came into power.’ Like it was some kind of hostile take-over.”

Rangiku feels something go up her spine like an electric shock. A sigh escapes Izuru’s mouth, sounding as if its scraping against the edge of his teeth all heavy and rough. “I told you before, there are only a handful of Prophets in the world at a time. Future Prophets go into training, then gain full power over the Church when the old Prophet who trained them passes.”

“So he was like your mentor.”

“In some ways.”

“What-”

Rangiku could live without this conversation continuing much further, especially if she has to listen to it. The Knight turns on her heels, flashlight turning on the two lanky shadows behind her like shadow puppets on the wall. “Hey, maybe now isn’t the best time to-”

And then her eye catches something in the rim of the flashlight’s glow, and the rest of her attention leaves her. A shape jutting out of the darkness and lurching into the light. “Oh.”

Well, that’s interesting.

Her flashlight leaves the boys and turns to the right wall, Izuru and Shuuhei’s eyes turn with it. A long, angular shape looms in a cavity dug into the wall like a museum exhibit on display. Some towering, skeletal figure draped in a colorless curtain. It's bare sides are flanked huge, bony vines like skeletal bat’s wings closing in on the figure like a protective grasp.

The way the cloth sticks to the skeleton, so thin and gauzy over each sharp curve of the bone, a cold pit opens up in Rangiku’s stomach. It reminds her of hospital blankets, and funeral pyres, wet blood cutting through white fabric. Looking at it makes her uneasy. She feels cold, like death.

“What-” Shuuhei says first, sounding like he was about to spring. “In the hell. Is that?”

The gears grind in Rangiku’s head, rebelling against the paragam of discomfort that arising just from looking at such a spooky figure now here in the decidedly unpleasant underground hidey-hole. “Its an idol. A statue for one of the gods.”

“The Penitence God.” Izuru agrees, taking a step towards the statue. “I knew it was down here somewhere. I used to come down here and pray during my training, before the tunnels were sealed off.”

“Why is it so fucking disturbing?” Shuuhei asks, in a truly impressive lack of consideration or concern or tact.

“To invoke a sense of awareness. Think of this big guy judging you when you do wrong,” Izuru gestures towards the idol’s head with familiarity. “Might make you want to keep a clear conscious, doesn’t it?”

“Are there more of them down here?” Rangiku asks, in a way that indicates she totally is not creeped out. “A lot of stuff was moved, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, definitely. The scarier it could be, the more likely we’re gonna find it.”

“Perfect.” At least she’s faced worst before. That should be an enormous comfort. Sure enough, the beam of electric light scans down the walls and finds more indents, carves into the wall like they were scooped out with enormous claws. In each of them is yet another idol, with monstrous hands reaching out towards their absent worshippers. If Rangiku didn’t know any better, she might think that they were purposely arranged in descending order of surreal and scary. “Let’s keep moving.”

She tries to look down the halls, to see how much longer they have, but the idols continue as far as her flashlight will reach. Looks like its more walking.

Shuuhei’s legs appear in the eye of Rangiku’s light, inching around one of the nearby statues to get a good look at it. His flashlight beams onto a larger than life-sized statue of a being with tree branches sprouting from its skull like winding antlers. “There must be hundreds of these things packed down here. Like the creepiest kinda art gallery.”

“No kidding.” Rangiku confirmed, still trying to squint and peer past him down the tunnel. “If I recall, it took months to move all the old shit down here. Right, Izuru? Each one of these idols must way a few hundred pounds.”

“You think so-”

Which happens to be the last thing out of Shuuhei’s mouth before the stone tiles underneath him creek loudly, like an urgent and heart-broken whine. The walls rumble as if to exhale, exhuming a puff of dry air from the thin cracks between the bricks and cement, and a small shift rises under in the floor at Rangiku’s feet. It pulses and undulates with some very uncertain force underneath them.

It rolls, bricks rippling and banging together underneath until it slowls to a common point. The the bricks moan and sink directly under Shuuhei’s feet.

Before Rangiku can even say ‘don’t move’, the stones drop away in a flash of dust. And Shuuhei is gone into an angry, shattered maw of a hole punched into the floor.

“Shuuhei!” Not a second later Rangiku’s shoes slide against the floor, scrabbling at the edge of the bricks. On impulse, she teeters toward the pit as if she might dive right in, hands scrabbling at her belt for her sword. Izuru’s bony fingers clenched around her shirt just barely prevent her from going down head-first.

“Matsumoto, wait!” The Prophet leans back with all his weight, even as she drags his tiny, skinny-kid heels. “Gods, you’re like a steam train in tennis shoes.”

Under their toes, the gangly pile of denim and faux-leather groans (or growls) to confirm that Shuuhei has not, in fact been crushed to death or fallen into the bottom of the earth. The spine-crushing pile of bricks he’s shaking off of his shoulders argue with this, but given that Rangiku has seen some fairly impressive feats of strength from the kid she perhaps shouldn’t be surprised. “Okay. Ow.”

“Hisagi,” Izuru puts all his strength into pulling Rangiku back- she does not move very dramatically- and leaning over her shoulder to look down. “Are you hurt?”

“If you say ‘your pride’ I swear I will finish that cave-in’s job.” Rangiku warns him through frantically gritted teeth.

“No. But I like your faith in my non-existent sense of humor.” Dirt and cobwebs rain on Shuuhei’s shoulders as he combs his fingers through his hair. “Can I get a hand down here?”

Its a steep drop for one person, but one unidentified semi-human and one specially skilled Knight could probably take it no problem. “Izuru, don’t move.” A directive finger is pointed from Izuru down to Shuuhei. “And you- be ready to catch me.”

A quiet and expectantly grumpy “What?” is managed before Shuuhei is forced to open up his arms for Rangiku to make a semi-soft landing. They can debate the details later, such as in regards to who missed what mark and who dropped who.

“This is fun. Now we both get to be in the hole. Let’s get Kira down here so we can have a hole party.”

“Are you guys dead?” Izuru’s voice is prompted, coming from above.

“We’re fine.” Rangiku dusts off her jeans. “Shuuhei?” His lanky arm waves up at her, the universal motion for assistance. “Bro.”

She heaves him up to his feet, kicking aside rocks. “All this crap didn’t just come from the ceiling, did it?”

“Honestly, I think I landed on something. I got jabbed in the back.” Shuuhei reaches back to rub at the small of his spine. His eyes roam over the floor and he jolts, thin lips curling and making his teeth look especially gruesome. “Oh.” He leans down, recovering a piece of polished stone. The curve of an eyebrow is visible, a life-sized, skull-like eyehole peering back accusatively under a black, imbedded gem. “Oh, that is unfortunate.” One historical and probably priceless religious relic down.

“What’s unfortunate?”

“Nothing, Izuru!” Rangiku chirps and quickly arranges herself in boost formation before whispering back to Shuuhei. “Get over here right now!”

Shuuhei’s fingers drag over the fragment of the idol, eyes narrowing. “Shuuhei?” His hands ascend, holding the shattered face up as if to make eye-contact. The rough ridge of the inside contrasts against the smooth, polished exterior, and the stone flashes white from Rangiku’s flashlight like the light bouncing off abalone colors of Shuuhei’s teeth.

He turns it over in his palms, stout fingers sliding into the open cavern of the eyehole. “Rangiku, check this out.”

She expects him to pull out a spider, perhaps, and she’ll have to scream at him. Something scrapes against the stone like the edge of a knife, a bone-shilling rattle that punches into the air. A bronzy glint of metal appears, tangled around Shuuhei’s knuckles, and when he pulls it leads out to a steel circle.

The pendent pools into Shuuhei’s palm, his nail tracing over the metal. Within the circle is a piece that looks to be connected by wire, as if to be wound up and spun around.

“What is it?” Rangiku relocates her flashlight beam, pouring the light into Shuuhei’s hand. The metal looks dark and crudely cut, all rough and sharp on the edge. “A necklace?”

“Must be one of the lost artifacts down here.” Rangiku guesses, thinking back to any one of Izuru’s long rambles about ancient pieces of history locked away from the modern age and from an increasingly self-aware population. She can’t recall what god would be associated to such a basic little trinket like this. Its doubtful that such a thing was even supposed to be down here in mixed up with an idol in the first place.

“Aren’t you supposed to be religious?”

Her flashlight shines in Shuuhei’s eye accusatively. “Hey, I’m just along for the ride, buddy. You’re Witch-associated, that makes you more certifiable in the creepy and unknown. Maybe Izuru knows something about it?” Shuuhei’s good eye hovers on the metal, tracing the pad of his thumb over the center piece. “Shuuhei?”

Something snaps back into focus, Shuuhei’s face rises to meet Rangiku’s gaze, and she’s reassured to see him looking like himself again. “Yeah?”

Now, Rangiku’s no expert in this sort of business. But she has been treasure-hunting, before. Played out the story of what happens when a fellow resident of the Cohorts gets greedy, and someone has to lose a few fingers before the day is over. Not that she’s worried about jabbing Shuuhei back into line if things go sketchy.

But if that can be avoided. “You feeling okay?”

“You do look pretty distracted.” Izuru’s voice joins them, suddenly sounding much closer than Rangiku recalls. Sure enough, a familiar bony frame appears out of the darkness, pale-straw hair falling out of his hood. Among the subjects that they are going to discuss after this trip, one of them is going to be appearing out of the goddamn darkness and giving hapless bystanders a heart-attack.

“The hell are you doing down here?” Rangiku manages after quickly checking that her blood is still flowing.

Izuru gives her an obvious look, as if he’s startled she would even ask. “I got bored.”

“We found a thing.” Shuuhei says, bringing the attention back to focus on the pendant. “Think its what we’re looking for?”

Izuru’s inked fingers pull at Shuuhei’s, opening up his palm to look at the necklace. Shuuhei’s fingers remain curled, as if he’s still reluctant to give it up, but Izuru continues poking the metal with his nail curiously. “That’s not it.”

“You sure?” Shuuhei asks, sounding very nearly disappointed. His brow furrows and a curious look is shared between him and Rangiku.

“We’re looking for something big.”

Rangiku braces her hands on her hips, more than a little critical. “You said we didn’t know what we were looking for.”

“I said I’d know it when I saw it.” Izuru states simply, dropping Shuuhei’s hand. “We need to keep searching.”

“Well, it might be a lot easier if we didn’t have a whole two cans of battery acid between us to light the way.” Rangiku points out, flashing her beam of light around the hall and earning squinty-eyed winces from both of her companions. “Izuru, could you please help us out?”

Izuru looks annoyed at the request, posture flattening as if Rangiku had asked him to do a chore or particularly annoying errand. His pipe-cleaner fingers tug around his hood securely. “Just use the flashlights.”

“We’re gonna die down here walking into a pit of open spikes because you won’t do the cool thing.”

Shuuhei, of course, has to intervene with blessed innocence. “What’s the cool thing?”

“Izuru’s tats light up and glow.” Rangiku explains as Izuru steams besides her. “Its pretty rad.”

“Every time I do it, I have to endure a lot of bad rave or lava lamp jokes and we’re trying to focus right now.” Izuru reaches over to grab Shuuhei’s wrist, which seems to entirely perplex the poor kid until he realizes Izuru is angling his flashlight. “See- there’s another pathway down here. I think its a shortcut. We can go down even further.”

There is, indeed, another pathway. It looks remarkably like the first up above, which doesn’t give Rangiku much hope. The tunnels all see to snake up and down and around each other. The only distinction is that this tunnel in particular bears some interesting graffiti against the walls, painted in vibrant cold hues..

At least Rangiku hopes that it is graffiti. For all she knows and can more likely bet on, its all ancient runes for “DANGER” and “DEATH IMMEDIATELY UP AHEAD.” That’d sound about right. Boy, it sure is nice that out of all the places Shuuhei had to plunge into, it was this place and not literally anywhere else in the world. Rangiku is thankful for that, because she is an adventurer, and adventurers don’t care about plunging or immediate death threats.

“So we keep moving.”

The unfortunate tour of the Catacombs isn’t the worst kind of legwork Rangiku has ever had to do, but its definitely the most ominous. Knights aren’t supposed to get this mixed up in religious affairs, not when there are vicious beasts to be slain and damsels in distress to swoon. There is a feeling of something incredibly old and hostile, to the point where walking through each text-covered hallway and stomping down chipped stone stairs gives the Catacombs an appropriate sense of it’s namesake, that they’re stepping further and further into an open grave.

                                                   

The flashlight beam catches nothing but runes and cobwebs, and Rangiku or Shuuhei could probably ask Izuru to try and translate. But she gets the impression it would only be a hindrance to the goal, and since Izuru offers no information unprompted Rangiku assumes there’s nothing good on yet.

On either side of them the walls stay even enough, with occasional small chunks of bricks missing. Leaks from the ceiling that land on their shoulders and draws a displeased noise from Shuuhei that Rangiku can tell the kid is lamenting whatever is soaking into his fancy jacket. Only further up ahead do the gaps get more noticeable, more precise.

There’s a torch mounted to the wall, and if Rangiku has explored enough dungeons to be anything close to an expert, she can guess there will be more. Her hand gropes blindly for Izuru’s arm, squeezing it. “Can you give us some more light now?”

This time he gives in. There’s a sharp crack, Izuru’s thin fingers snapping together and at once small plumes of fire burst along the walls, bracketing the search party on both sides. The orange glow reaches wider and further than the flashlight ever could, and suddenly each crack in the wall is thrown into dark, contrasting shadow.

There, along the walls between the rows of torches, are deep indents. Clean squares as if they were carved out of the brick like that, then covered with large, smooth slabs of stone. Some of them are just that- unmarked plates of a different kind of rock than the surrounding walls. Most of them have a symbol scratched into the surface, depicting diagonal lines.

Izuru’s shoes scuff against the dusty floor, his stride even more trance-like than usual. The hood slides off of his head to pool around his shoulders as he turns his head from one side of the hall to the other, revealing a furrowed brow. He looks concerned, which of course concerns Rangiku. She and Shuuhei share a curious glance.

“Is this what we’re looking for?” If so, Rangiku preferred the dirty scrap metal pendent.

“No.” Izuru says, wandering over to touch blue fingertips to the slabs. “They’re graves.”

She can hear a rough noise coming from Shuuhei’s jaw, his fangs grinding together loudly. “Right. Catacombs. Dead people. That matches. When people couldn’t afford plots of land for graves, they got dumped down here, weren’t they?” Of course Shuuhei would know about something morbid and weird like that.

“We’re getting closer.” Izuru decides, eyes going down to his shoes toeing the floor. “This is one of the Church’s less savory little secrets.”

That tone doesn’t sit right on Rangiku’s shoulders. She inches towards the Prophet, trying to restrain herself from reach out. “Izuru?”

“These aren’t for people without graves. It started out that way, but my predecessors found out they could use it for other things as well.” Izuru’s lips drag down, eyes thinning into cruel blue slits cut into his face with claws. “It became more convenient for this to be the place for the Church to hide evidence. Backstabbers, business competitors, political enemies of the Church.”

“So. This is an entire corridor full of murdered people.” Nice. Rangiku’s breath leaves her throat. It falls flatly against the stale air in this breathless, lifeless place. The slabs of stones on the makeshift graves seem closer, as if squeezing in on them. It feels heavy on her shoulders.

She thinks about what she’s feeling right now, what she is processing. More than anything else, its a hollow sense of being disappointed.

Shuuhei’s face is unreadable mask, his brows furrowed deeply. Of course, his mouth always makes reading his expression difficult in the way that its a consistent ghastly frown. In the back of Rangiku’s mind, the annoying sound of Renji’s voice can he heard spitting venom against the Church and it’s dark nature. She wouldn’t doubt this is what he meant. That its all too easy to admit he’s right.

The Inhuman’s grey eyes darken, hitting one of the slabs with the greater focus of his flashlight and his jaws part like a silent hiss. “Is that a ‘W?’”

He means the symbol scratched onto one of the graves. Iit wasn’t obvious to her at first. Rangiku’s shoes pad against the floor and bring her closer towards one of the slabs, fingers coming into contact with cold stone and she can see it now. The diagonal scratches making a sloppy ‘W’.

“These are Witch graves.” Rangiku breathes, and her mind scrolls back to what little history she learned in a vast life lacking formal education. About in the old days, when the Church held Witch Hunts and hundreds of Witches were executed. When devices like the Iron Jaw were invented and magic users were pushed to the brink of society, nearly eradicated and destroyed in the mad scramble for one faith- one power- to claim dominance over the others. “They must be hundreds of years old.”

Izuru’s palm opens up over the stone, fingers spreading against the engraving. “They’re not that old. The Hunts went on a lot longer than people believe. Much longer, in fact.”

Again, a pounding of disappointment that strikes her chest. Of course, Rangiku of all people should know how people with power work their ways around the rules. Her loyalty feels all the more empty, and a familiar ancient venom rises in her throat like bile.

Shuuhei’s hands form tense, rock-like fists in his pocket. “This is pretty shitty.”

“Yeah.” Rangiku’s hand finally lands on it's mark of Izuru’s bony shoulder, and her grasp feels like iron under her skin. Her arm is an anchor, and Izuru’s stance is stubborn under her hands but she knows it’ll give. “Let’s keep moving.”

“We need to start being more careful. There’s dark magic here.” Izuru’s face turns, and on it Rangiku can see years and years and years. Eyes framed in watery glow on pale skin, some wide and startlingly visible part of him written on his face like an oozing open wound. “Restless spirits create restless curses. There’s something bad nearby.”

“Wow, no shit. You mean the piles of dead bodies?” Shuuhei’s voice has a surprising amount of bite, voice scraping against the floor. “I feel like if this was a professional job, this place would not have passed the screening for acceptable work environments. No, we would have stopped at ‘evidence of secret hate-crimes and murderous conspiracy.’”

“‘Professional job.’” Izuru’s voice is sour like a dry wind. “You mean if you were working with Abarai on this. I know fully well that he has his reasons for staying away from this place. I even know they’re legit. That’s why I needed you and not him.”

Rangiku’s arms swing between them. “Hey! This is a stupid conversation but let’s have it later.”

Shuuhei’s eyes screw up with focus even through her rapidly gesticulating fingers, dark lines curling around his face against torchlight. “So you invited me because you couldn’t bring him? I already said I don’t care what weird vendetta you two have with each other, I don’t wanna be a part of it.”

“You’re not a part of it. There’s no vendetta.” Izuru’s voice darkens, and his fingers twitch. They travel up to his brow and comb through flaxen hair like knives. “I’m not the one who has a problem with Abarai, and I don’t have anything against you. I don’t expect you to trust me, but you being difficult isn’t moving us any further!”

“‘Further’ is not a location, ‘hellish murder-hole’ is! You knew this was down here the whole time, and you didn’t think to tell me about it. You think maybe knowing what you know about me, something like this might matter?” Shuuhei spits back, and what surprises Rangiku is not just the displeasure in his tone but the way he almost sounds…. legitimately hurt. Maybe even afraid, wondering what kind of business he’s gotten involved in. Shuuhei’s teeth scrape against each other anxiously, like nails crawling over stone. His body is tense with crooked spider limbs, showing a beastly side out a person Rangiku has always known to be so reassuringly reasonable. So human. “Witches may not have always been cool by me, but they’re a hell of a lot better than ordinary humans. I do care if they get killed.”

So apparent is his distress, so unusually forward about the kind of anger she’s accustomed to seeing Shuuhei subvert, Rangiku doesn’t notice the rising breeze until its in her hair and cooling the sweat on the back of her neck ice cold.

It comes from deeper down the way they were walking, and if Rangiku were in a more relaxed and controlled state of mind she would easily deduce that it meant there was some force either moving the air around, coming or a second exit to the surface. As things are right now, she’s just positive it means potential trouble.

But when it comes to dividing her attention, Rangiku has never been able to keep her eyes off of Izuru. Shuuhei has a point- Izuru must have known about this place. What evidence of ruined lives and boxed-up corpses and unresolved evil. What it means to be dropped in a place like this. Izuru must have foreseen this event, even if the gods didn’t lay it out for him.

The fingers in Izuru’s hair slide back to the nape of his neck, clutching the long, stray strands there and tugging in a way Rangiku can only associate with impatience or anxiety. His lids slide over his eyes when he answers. “I thought it might be down here, but I didn’t have proof. Even if I did, it wasn’t relevant to the job.”

“It wasn’t relevant?” Shuuhei’s voice hisses, and he’s a dark shape looming over the Prophet as much as his lanky form would allow. “Or you thought that I’d change my mind and think that Renji was right about you the whole time.”

“This isn’t about him. Its not always about him!” Izuru’s voice grates, eyes snapping back open and a scowl deepening on his smooth features. Frustration drips off of him, oozing out of his pores and veins. The winds rise, ripping at hair and clothes with hungry teeth.

“Guys!” Rangiku’s voice cuts through the air, roaring over the sound of the wind. In the corner of her eye, she sees a black shape dart through the cobwebs and the currents. Blood sings in her ears like a battle hymn her hand itches for the solid mass of her blade. But slashing at nothing won’t get anything done. “We need to get out of here!”

Two sets of eyes snap to her, blinding through wind-swept bangs and the reality of their surroundings dawn on the two of them at once. The flashlight drops from her hands and bounces into the corner as Rangiku’s claws curl into Izuru and Shuuhei’s sleeves and she is yanking them them nearly off their feet and running down the hall, three long gaits pounding against the floor and the wind and the returning darkness as the lanterns blow out one by one by one.

Ducking down the hall is like running through a wind-tunnel utself, the air resisting Rangiku’s footsteps as she tries to get traction underneath her. The orange light drains away and at once she’s running blind with the weight of Izuru and Shuuhei being pulled behind her. The whirlwind smells thickly of salt and methanol, clogging her eyes and nose and throat as the three of them run further and further into the unknown and uncertain.

Right when it feels as if her feet are about to lift off the ground and not come back down, the bottom of her sneaker finds a stark edge and a sudden lack of resistance pulling her back. Rangiku’s heel strikes the cliff of a sudden drop, momentum pulling her and her two anchors in either fist over over the gap and tripping against an open, spacious floor-space.

Rangiku’s feet are unsteady landing. Her balance wobbles and sneakers skid against tiles with the sudden lack of a wall on either side of her to be closed in by. After a few rushed, unsteady half-steps, her weight topples forwards and her knees hit the ground for a rough landing. From the sounds of bodies hitting the ground nearbye, she could make the assumptions that Izuru and Shuuhei met a similar fate.

But- she doesn't feel the wind on her back anymore. The rattle of air in the halls already sound more and more distant. But all that she finds in front of her is blackness and the taste of sour, dead air in her mouth.

“Izuru,” Rangiku tries, her palm slapping against the floor as she pushes herself up. Her knees and palms sting with rawness. With no small amount of sarcasm, she tries “I know this is kind of a trifle for you, but I think we could really use that light right now.”

There’s a moment of quiet that she imagines contains a silent, exasperated roll of the eyes. “Yes, I see your point.” And then finally blue light filtering over the floor like the glow of a lit aquarium, peels of whites rippling through the cool blue, and the tiles underneath Rangiku’s hand light up reminiscent of a glossy mosaic.

Shuuhei rolls over onto his back, groaning. She can see his eye pop open, “So, that’s interesting.” and she has to look up herself, only mildly irritated to have to investigate whatever new fresh hell they’ve stepped into.

The explanation for the lack of walls becomes more apparent with the light crawling out of Izuru’s tattoos from under his collar and sleeves. There’s a vast, dark space hanging over them, concaving inwards far above their heads. Something lurches out of the walls, some vaguely human shapes carved as if falling out of the ceiling. The blue light struggles to reach up, uncovering otherwordly shapes against the forms.

“Are those more idols?” Rangiku asks, trying to squint the darkness away. She racks her mind to put names to the figures, but nothing pops into mind.

The walls follow the same formula as the catacombs, more or less, but sleeker and neater. Shiny black stone plates put into the walls, and instead of scratches they glow with gold engravings. Each one has a name and a date.

“So is this like the nice place they put you when you die? The luxury suite. Kira?” Rangiku pulls herself up to bruised knees and dusts them off, mentally preparing herself for another history lesson. On her other side, Izuru has shuffled around to Shuuhei. His hand extends carefully, fingers slightly curled in towards the palm as if he’s expecting Shuuhei to bite it off.

Shuuhei gets the same look on his face when he’s tempering his patience for dealing with Renji on difficult days, a mulish but ultimately forgiving stubbornness. His hand claps against Izuru’s and he gets hoisted up to his feet- admittedly, mostly by his own power, but Izuru is probably crucial leverage.

“So, yeah. What’s this?” Shuuhei echoes her question, turning his eyes away from the other two and shoving his hands into his jacket pocket. Rangiku figures he’s probably not aware of the aggravated way that Izuru’s brow furrows, or the way his glowing eyes burrow into the Inhuman’s back.

“I don’t know.” Izuru admits. “That wind might have been one of the traps set down here to keep people out. If so, this might be where we’re actually meant to end up for once. How far we have come.”

Rangiku’s gaze settles on eye-level, this entire place tinted in blue from Izuru’s glow like they’re submersed in water. There, is where her eye is drawn to- the only pop of color that catches the blue light in this whole dusty place.

Her footsteps sound loud to her own ears even as she quietly stalks to the splotch of orange-gold placed against the wall, very precisely laid under one of the slabs with pinpoint accuracy. A little red candle sits next to it, wick untouched. Rangiku kneels down, off-handedly noticing how morbidly cute the set-up was. As if someone was setting up for tiny brunch in front of a grave.

The flowers are marigolds. Their stems soak in an inch of water, as if they had been placed here recently. But of course, the idea that anyone has been down in the catacombs this deep to tend to this one particular grave is nearly impossible. The cutsey feeling vanishes almost instantly.

Rangiku straightens back up onto her feet, eyes traveling up to the golden thread of the engraving written into the slab. It hurts her eyes a little, the loopy cursive set against jet black that reads:

ROSE OTORIBASHI

PROPHET OF THE DIVINE FORCES. BLESSED BY THE GOD OF SOUND.

There’s a matching inscription underneath. A coin-sized stamp, that when she runs her fingers over it Rangiku can tell its a picture of a bird, long neck arched gracefully and tail feathers curling into the shape of a rose. The style looks very familiar. She’s seen it stamped onto Izuru’s finger almost every day.

“Hey, you guys wanna check this out?” Blue floods her vision on one side as Izuru approaches, a heavy shadow on the other side when Shuuhei lurks up behind them. “You know this guy?”

Izuru blinks at her, narrow eyes going from Rangiku to the name on the slate. “No.” Blue spotlights travel down to the small vase and reports in a very matter-of-fact tone. “That’s some odd magic there.”

In Rangiku’s experience, this is the part where she is asked to do something ridiculous and tedious. Izuru’s inked fingers draw over his chin thoughtfully, dragging his nails over his lips with a far away look. Its a look Rangiku recognizes, when he’s trying to see forces beyond most people’s understandings. Picking apart the universe one layer at a time to see the divine plan.

And he does not disappoint her. “We should open it.”

Shuuhei’s lips curl over his uneven gums, giving a concerned side-ways glare. “Open the grave?”

“Yes.”

“That grave right there.”

“Yep, that’s the one.”

“Open it. For reasons.”

Shuuhei looks like he might resist, or at least push back enough to get a rise out of Izuru again. Their eyes meet with a cutting kind of friction, and Rangiku interjects with her hand wrapped around Shuuhei’s bicep and a restrained sigh.

“Just help me out with this, ‘kay? I bet this’ll be like cardboard to someone like you.” His fists clench into tight knots, but he allows her to position him against the wall.

She’s careful to watch Izuru’s fingers digging into the slim gap between the slate and the wall, being so much more thin and delicate than her’s and Shuuhei’s stronger, calloused hands. Shuuhei easily takes the weight of the stone, but its still a heavy lift on Rangiku’s side straining her arms and her hands. They wouldn’t weigh down the slabs over graves with magic would they? No, that’d be ridiculous. They’d just build everything down here with heavy as hell rocks, that’s perfect.

There’s a warning for everybody to watch their toes, then the slab makes a rough but not quite destructive landing against the floor with black chips flying off at the corners. Within the empty square of the grave, the wooden shape of the coffin is starkly visible.

Rangiku is about to ask what they’re supposed to do now before Shuuhei has the chance to complain, when she is rudely interrupted by a harsh, unhappy grinding noise. The sound of wood sliding roughly against uneven stone, and Rangiku spreads her arms back over the boys automatically as the coffin slides out of the wall.

She’s willing to bet this isn’t supposed to happen, even in a place as old and freaky as this one, when the coffin hangs in the air as if supported by an invisible bench. An ornate shape of wood that almost reminds her more of puzzle box than a coffin, with swirls and swoops carved into the oak. A black line is wrapped around the entire length of the object, thick and textured and gleaming in miniscule rivets under Izuru’s light like intertwined wires going over and around the coffin as it would ribbon on a wrapped gift.

The cord jerks as if pulled by a string, falling to the floor in piles. This is not a routine that Rangiku is all too familiar with, but she can guess what happens next.

Her hands slam down on the lid of the coffin, pushing all her weight down, and it wobbles in thin air under the force of her with the lid held on tight. There’s a noise from within, a loud and unhappy rasp like an acrid sound of death. Something pounds against the lid from the inside with a shocking amount of force that makes Rangiku’s teeth rattle around in her jaws.

Shuuhei catches up with the program first, rushing up on the other side to stretch his arms over the coffin to help hold it closed. The entire thing bucks and complains underneath them, even as Rangiku and Shuuhei try to drag it down with their full weight.

She catches Izuru’s voice off in the corner of her ear, like he’s speaking under water. It sounds like he’s shouting to stop or to get their attention, which is a little far from what Rangiku wants to be hearing. And trust her, she really would be concerned with him right now if this didn’t seem to need her very immediate and serious attention.

Their weight is doing little against whatever is trying to break out, since this coffin clearly has an agenda to snap open and knock the two of them down on their asses. Rangiku collides with the ground for a third time today, the sound of air escaping Shuuhei’s lungs echoing next to her ears. The lid flies to some distant corner and she can hear it explode into a shower of splinters.

She expects, also, to hear Izuru. His reaction, his movement, is summoning some godly magic to help them. But there’s nothing but his quiet glow.

Her eye-line goes up from the floor, trying to locate Izuru’s soft shoes to yell at him for some back up. What she finds is a distinct lack of Izuru’s feet, but the narrow angle of a shiny oxford toe, which is quite clearly nicer than Izuru’s entire wardrobe.

“I’m so sorry, dear.” A warm, harmonious voice lilts. “Did I startle you?”

The feet are attached to long, long, impossibly long legs, hidden under shapely slacks. A hand reaches down to take hers, and only when her palm is encased in dry, bony bleached digits does she realize its because a skeletal hand that's reaching to her from the arm of a tailored suit-jacket.

“Holy shit.” Rangiku comes to her feet and understands Izuru’s stunned silence. A pale-white, ghoulish face grins at her over a pressed tie and cravat, skinless face baring thirty-two shining teeth.

The skeletal figure clacks his jaw at them with a noise that sounds eerily like pleasant laughter. He throws his head back and ripples of golden fire erupt from the top of his skull and roll down his neck. The flames lick at his shoulders in rolling waves, a bright and fiery halo. “Ah yes, I thought this might happen.”

The skeleton of Rose Otoribashi steps back, brushing his naked phalanges over his suite. Time is taken to analyze his own hands, roll up his cuffs to check out his bony wrists. A golden ring glitters between the joints on his right hand. “Goodness, this is abhorrent. I thought they would at least preserve my body better, but I suppose this preferable to being a rotting sack of flesh. That would just be entirely gruesome! Now-”

He struts across the floor, striding right past Shuuhei and Rangiku to stand before Izuru, all grandiose skeletal figure and yellow plumes of flame. His suit sags in places where one imagines flesh used to be before it decomposed right off, and there’s a rhythmic clacking to accompany each step. “Ah, my replacement!”

He takes a dumbstruck Izuru’s hand in his and shakes it with great enthusiasm. Izuru’s arm waves in a noodle-like fashion to his precisely polite movements. “I’m glad I had the chance to meet you. I’ve been waiting quite a while, we almost weren’t sure you’d make it this far.”

Izuru doesn’t even blink, eyes still wide and lit up like headlights. His mouth hangs open a little bit, expression torn between the shocked and the incredulous. One bony hand claps him on an admittedly less bony shoulder and that seems to jar him, finally spilling out a “Who the hell are you?”

The skeleton of Rose Otoribashi takes back his hands, gesticulating in the air with his finger bones with no faint trace of impatience. “Oh, I hate doing introductions. Polite, but so boring. Though you bring up an excellent point! I’m so glad the young people taking over are so conscientious, it gives me a greater hope.”

Having said that, the skull’s jaw snaps shut and he leans back before giving an artistic bow that might have been punctual and professional if he didn’t lower himself down a few extra inches than a correctly attached spine should allow, rising back up with a flourish. “In my youth I was simply The Prophet, but you may know me as Otoribashi Rose. I am the predecessor to your predecessor.”

“You’re-” Izuru looks no less bewildered, and Rangiku can relate. Apparently coming back to life as a skeleton is an unprecedented event even for the universal anomalies known as Prophets.

The only person who doesn’t seem entirely shocked is Shuuhei, who is just as likely to have seen enough necromancy shit in his time for it to lose its glamour, now that Rangiku thinks about it. All he does is look his usual degree of put-upon crankiness as he helps himself to his feet and dusts cobwebs off his pants in flaky showers. “Can I take a wild guess and say that this was finally what we were supposed to find down here? I mean, you don’t get much more sacrilegious than bringing back the dead.”

The suit of bones who addressed himself as Rose Otoribashi looks miffed at that comment, though its not terribly apparent since he can’t change any of his facial features. Rangiku is inclined to believe that if he could, Rose would be giving Shuuhei a withering glower. “With all-due respect, my new specimen of a friend, I think that you of all people would know. If a soul resists being put to rest, who’s to say that’s is not due to fate? You and I could have just as much a right to be on this earth as anyone else.”

Shuuhei’s lips curl over his teeth, exposing raw pink gums even as his eyes divert to a dark corner. Rangiku’s brows rise and the wheels churning in her brain. “You’re undead?”

He shrugs, combing his fingers through the hair on the nape of his neck. “Technically, still dead. Half-dead. Its a long story.”

“We’ve known each other for, like, a handful of months now and you couldn’t have squeezed that in somewhere along the way?”

Shuuhei’s expression turns somewhere at the junction of exasperated, hands set on his hips in a way that reminds Rangiku of herself, actually. “Sorry, why don’t you go ahead and tell your life story if you wanna share so much? We clearly have time, since we apparently haven’t accomplished anything yet".

Izuru rubs his eye with his fingers, the blue light spilling from them blinking out momentarily like shadow-puppets over a flashlight. “You’re dead.” Now that Rose’s attention is away from him, he seems to have regained himself in a peculiar way. His voice sounds like realization. “That’s why Renji made you his Familiar. He gave you a part of his soul to bring you back to life.”

Predictably, Shuuhei reacts with hackles raised. He gets all tight, teeth grinding and and shoulders clenched around his jaws in a way that well and truly does look physically uncomfortable. “If your Gods told you that, send them a message to stay out of my business.”

“They didn’t.” Its almost impossible to read the way Izuru moves, whether its something to do with his reality-altering powers or simply the way he skulks across the floor, but one moment he’s cornered on his own by the shadows and his own light and the next he’s bare inches away from Shuuhei. That cool blue light bounces off of Shuuhei’s dark form and swims over Izuru’s pale skin and they look ghastly.

“So why would he do that?” Izuru doesn’t raise his voice- Rangiku has never heard him raise his voice to anybody, let alone out of anger, but his tone drips like poison. The hairs on the back of her neck rise, but that doesn’t stop Izuru’s bright eyes like judgement from blaring into a squinting Shuuhei’s face. “Who are you really?”

Rangiku wants to make a move to intervene again, but this feels like overload. That Shuuhei’s teeth bare and for the first time in a while Rangiku remembers how monstrous he looks. That Izuru is suddenly up in his face in a very un-Izuru like way. That they are all the way down here, a whole who knows how far from the surface and surrounded by corpses and she’s been a normal old human who’s messing around with this magic business way longer than her lifespan justifies. A migraine begins to settle in her brain.

She loves an adventure, but Gods. Rangiku could really stand to be having an adventure above ground right now, in the light of day. “Kira, cut it it out!”

Shuuhei just looks down his nose at Izuru, who is eye-level with a row of savage, razor teeth. “I’m nobody. Why’sit matter to you?”

“You know what I mean.” Izuru’s eyes narrow to half-moons, throwing long shadows over Shuuhei’s face. The Prophet’s stony expression doesn’t match the tenseness in his voice, and Rangiku begins to feel the air suddenly grow heavy around her in a way that is reminiscent of oncoming doom. “Who are you to him?”

And Shuuhei’s blood looks like its just boiling inside his skin, heat dripping off of him like steam and smoke. His arm jerks, pushing roughly against Izuru’s chest and Rangiku’s boots scuff the floor as she slides forward, but she’s hardly a pace closer in their direction when she notices Shuuhei’s hands are sliding through Izuru like a fountain of water. Fingers break through the other side, splitting through the spine and dripping darkness like smoke spilling over the floor.

Shuuhei realizes he’s clutching nothing but air, and tightens his hand into a fist that he pulls back out of Izuru and pins down to his own hip. A poisonous look is etched across his eyes. “We found,” He says dangerously, with tampered patience “The weird-ass secrets of your stupid idiot church. This is the end.”

He gestures around them hands curled into claws, and Rangiku realizes that he’s right. There’s no exit except the way they came in. No more doors, except to more graves.

“Can you please consider sharing with the rest of the field trip what we were supposed to be doing here, and be helpful for a change of pace?”

Izuru doesn’t look moved, only all the more affirmed for Shuuhei’s backing down. “I told you, I’ll know it when I see it.” There’s finality in his tone, and maybe that’s finally what starts to catch at Rangiku’s nerves.

Its very uncomfortable, being on the sidelines of a conversation like this. Rangiku’s not used to it at all. She’s about ready to not-so-gently cut in again and banish them each to their own corner of the room or turn this car around or something when a rattling sound that has to either be a cat bounding into a cardboard box or a skeleton bounding into his coffin reminds her of the other most immediate concern in the room.

Skeleton in question seems largely occupied with detaching the bedding that lines his coffin, ripping out the seams as he hums in a way that echoes faintly inside his skull and is cheerfully distracted from the three arguing spelunkers who disturbed his resting place.

Rangiku’s eyes scan over to Izuru and Shuuhei, wondering if she should let Izuru bite the bullet out of respect for Prophet solidarity or let Shuuhei’s overwhelming bluntness tackle the situation head on. But they’re all tired, and getting pretty impatient so Rangiku decides fuck it. Just. Fuck it.

“Uh, Mr. Otoribashi?” Rangiku tries, taking a long stride towards the ex-Prophet. “Rose? Can I call you Rose?”

Rose pauses in his rifling, looking up at her with a light in his eye-sockets that Rangiku chooses to interpret as a good-natured twinkle in his eye and not just his immortal soul confined to this form. “Of course you may. I suppose this is all rather rude of me, leaving my guests to chat amongst themselves. In this, my very own burial grounds! What a poor host I’ve been!”

Shuuhei chuffs from a bit further away “Don’t worry bout it.” And Rangiku would elbow him in the ribs if she wasn’t busy smiling brightly. “What’cha up to, here?”

The cushiony interior is tossed to the side, exposing the wooden interior. “I just needed a moment to- Ah, there she is!” Rose’s branch-like arms scoop into the coffin and resurface with an entire guitar that he holds up with an impeccable flourish of showmanship. “Yes! I knew they’d do something right when making my arrangements. The funeral was such a drag, you wouldn’t believe- all Church proceedings, very official and respectable, a complete chore and forgettable waste of everybody’s time.” Rose spits off observations with startling casualness, and Rangiku takes a moment to admire how well he took his funeral going off of his plans because if it were her, she’d be pretty pissed.

He strokes the the neck of the guitar like the spine of a cat. “But I told them in my will, ‘If you are to do nothing else correctly, at least see that I am laid to rest with the only thing that gave me warmth and joy in this cold abyss of bureaucracy you all subjected me to.’ I could die all over again if I had a heart left to give out. Oh, perhaps that’s somewhere in here, too!”

As cool as that would be, Rangiku sincerely hopes not. The last thing they need is another unsettling distraction to add to this unsettling distraction. She wags a finger vaguely at Rose. “Well, about that, actually… My associates were wondering-”

“Why is it that I have risen from the grave at your arrival?” Rose stands up suddenly, guitar balanced on his hip. “I was waiting, of course, to help you with that which you seek.”

“Oh.” Rangiku’s spine straightens, a rare genuine feeling of hope burbling up. “Really? That’s great! We’re looking for what was hidden.”

“Yes.” Rose says with a nod, fiery hair bouncing gracefully against his shoulders and somehow not setting any of his clothes aflame. “And now you have found it.”

“Scuse me?” Rangiku’s face falls, and at that moment Izuru slides close.

She glances to her side, and Izuru is saddled almost shoulder to shoulder with her, suddenly hunched up and looking not unlike a cat left out in the cold with those big luminous eyes and hands stuffed into shapeless pockets. He’s suddenly interested. Suddenly nervous. “Found it?” And his voice is suddenly wary.

A breath of a reluctant sign rolls over Rose’s teeth (somehow). “Yes, what it is you came down here to look for. The question and the answer- my successor.”

The spoilt hope turns into a heavy stone deep in Rangiku’s gut, sudden dread. Sudden ice. “You were the Prophet before him. Before Gin.”

Rose’s jaw clacks, and it sounds surprisingly furious. He strums against a guitar string to produce a sour note and then distracts himself by attempting to tune it. “Yes, Gin Ichimaru was my apprentice when I still lead the Church, although at the time my powers were rather limited by the dim wit of my so-called ‘fans’. More political nonsense the likes to which you thankfully didn’t have to see.”

Evidently irritated by the lack of friction between bone and wood, Rose adjusts the guitar’s shoulder strap around his neck. Though it looks suspiciously like busying himself, and Izuru’s light dims next to Rangiku. “A foolish, cruel boy. The foolish, cruel boy who had me killed and usurped my Church. Years of work I did to improve relations between Devotees, warriors and Witches.” He looks up from his instrument, the joints in his neck clicking dryly. Genuine sadness leaks through the theatrics and into his voice, like acid. “All of it wasted. Gone straight into the wrong hands, just as he predicted. Lives were ruined. You’ve seen them.”

The tombs leer at the four of them like walls of eyes.

“Its not your fault, you know.”

Rangiku’s attention snaps back up, and he notices Rose’s face could be pointed in either her or Izuru’s direction. Izuru notices, too, and she feels him move a bare inch back.

But Rose just holds a steady, unreadable gaze. “Neither of you could have stopped him.” The spirit looks back down at his guitar, and his thumb brushes over the string without making any noise. “Gin was a sadistic child when he came into my custody. I didn’t have much hope that he would change, and I asked the Gods constantly why they had chosen him of all creatures. But I still wanted to believe I could restrain him. He had no harmony, and I thought that would keep him weak. But he made powerful allies. Even that kind of power can fade away, in the end.”

When he looks up, he’s definitely looking in Rangiku’s direction, and his voice is a bit harder. It ties a knot in her throat and twists. “I don’t blame you for wanting to be loyal to him. He was your friend. You did the honorable thing in the end.”

It comes back to her in a rush, the sights and smells swimming into her brain as if Rangiku were still standing in that cellar. As if she had the sword in her hand and the boot on her boots sticking her to the floor like she was a statue. It all rolls through her brain like projection slides flashing over each other again and again and again.

She wants to throw up and swallow it all back down, hold on to that night in her gut like a gallon of gasoline to guzzle down and deposit on an oil fire. Fists clench tight at her sides and Rangiku feels her nails bite into soft skin.

But its extinguished by Shuuhei’s voice. “You killed that guy?” And it all hits her like the light of day. Like fresh fire.

Rangiku’s lips pull back over sharp teeth, and she’s ready to hiss and spit if not for Izuru’s voices cutting in with a serrated edge. “No, I did.”

She whirls around on her heels, and the room spins with her on a wild axis. “You don’t have to say it like that.” Rangiku spits out like acid dribbling from her raw gums, and the walls seem tighter, just like her skin squeezing her in. “I made it possible. You did enough, that was my responsibility.”

Izuru’s brow pinches, and he looks so much like he did before. Years ago when he was younger and not the same kind of person he is now, and he thought Rangiku was going to snap him in two. The hired muscle and silver tongue of a corrupted Prophet keeping people in line. She feels the lines of her smooth face pull back in a snarl, a sensation like something hot and angry is going to claw out of her body.

Rangiku’s lungs feel like they’re filling with smoke, with claws and nails. Shuuhei’s teeth gnash in that way she’s learned to mean anxiety, but his expression is indecipherable across his warped face as ever. She thinks he’s curious, suspicious. “Why’d you kill the last Prophet?”

“Because he deserved it!” Rangiku bursts, and her inflection makes it sound like she’s asking a question that should be painfully obvious. Her palms fall open, gesturing wildly at something she wants to be apparent. “Because he set the Church back almost fifty years and led the campaign to push Witches back to the brink of society? Because he ruined everything he touched and terrorized everyone around him and because-”

Because? Because he made her help? Because she thought it was for the greater good, that Gin might be strange and cold and cruel but he was kind to her, and that should have been what counted. Her first friend, even when she was homeless and powerless and worthless and no good to anyone, he was there like a gift from the gods to guide her to the Cohorts and rise her from the ranks of a squire to a Holy Warrior.

She still misses him, that little boy who used to sneak through the window and climb down the bannisters to see her when she was supposed to be working for the grown-ups. And take her hands and hold them under cold water until the blistered stopped bleeding and told her that she was okay, it was going to be worth it when she was a big, strong Knight and those blistered turned into callouses turned into talons turned into knives.

Because she wasn’t alone on that night. When a wispy young thing came into the Cathedral with frightened eyes and a frightened heart and something about him just wasn’t right. And she should have noticed sooner the way that Gin drained him until he was pale and pallid. That happened to everyone who was around him.

Maybe it even happened to her.

Rangiku’s fingers run through her hair, pushing it back out of her face. Her heart leaps into her throat, just as it did when his body was already broken and bleeding, writhing like a snake nailed to the floor through its windpipe and Rangiku’s sword was too heavy in Izuru’s hands that his entire body shuddered but he picked it up anyways eventually. Eventually.

“It was fate, my dear.” Rose says, his voice oozes kindness that Rangiku doesn’t want to hear. She doesn’t want fate. Knights make their own destiny. They are not helpless to the uncaring whims of higher powers, locked in a cage of bullshit omens and prophecy. They don’t let people get hurt. “You did well. Your actions helped Izuru prove himself to the gods as the new Prophet.”

“Yeah.” Rangiku agrees, but it fails to pull out the nails in her neck. She feels something large and angular press up against her arm, Shuuhei leaning against her in the way she’s seen him do with Renji from time to time. Izuru fingers flex, and she can feel them on her other side brushing against her while the blue glow hovers over the floor.

“I know you want answers- why Gin was the kind of person that he was. Why he did the things that he did.” Rose continues, and as Rangiku looks up to see that his face is not pointed in her direction but in Izuru’s. “But there isn’t one. There’s no secret down here for you.”

Those twitching fingers roll up to Izuru’s collar, tugging at it. Pulling it up to his chin and his teeth, hands twisted taut. “I just… I wondered if there was something down here that we’d overlooked. That he was hiding.”

“I’m sorry.” Rose’s voice echoes quietly. He lowers the guitar, cradling it in his arms. His jaw works, tensely, and Rangiku can imagine him with skin and muscle and hair layers over his face, handsome and youthful and so sincerely unhappy.

“I see.” Breath fills Izuru’s lungs, expanding his chest and his ribcage and Rangiku can’t read that. “You said… that he was down here, too.”

Rose’s hand brushes against his jaw, and there’s a grinding noise from bare bone rubbing against bone. His teeth, chew on the empty space between his finger bones where the joint should be, deciding. “Yes, he was buried down here. Gin angered so many people in his life, particularly witches. Powerful, spiteful, vengeful souls are likely to have polluted his grave by now. Its too dangerous to have above ground.”

“Can I see it?”

Rangiku’s eyes snap to him, and she feels jaws slowly close down on her heart. And she wonders if this is something he really needs. If this is a part of the grieving process- not for Gin, but for the past.

“You don’t have to do this.”

Izuru shrugs, and the fingers worrying at his hood sink into the fabric. Its hard for her to find her pupils in his eyes right now, but her eyes squint and she tries. Izuru’s voice is solid and steady. “Its okay.”

Rose jabs his thumb towards the wall, hand sliding out of his ironed cuffs. “Do what you must.”

Izuru’s light fades from the center of the room, gliding like a satellite across a dark, starless sky. Blue bleeds away into black and the most clear things that Rangiku can make out without the flow are Rose’s bones and Shuuhei’s teeth, a both a bleached white fighting against obscurity.

And Shuuhei’s eyes stay laser-focused on Izuru’s back, and don’t seem to struggle at all in the dark. Rangiku wonders if whatever sort of… deformity that produced Shuuhei’s Inhuman traits came with some enhanced vision as an evolutionary offset.

She had been content to assume that Shuuhei was like Ichigo, an accident of the universe. Most Inhumans came from non-magic folks fucking around with magic, or tampering with monsters. A person gets bitten and turns into a werewolf. A cursed princess gives birth to a minotaur. Ichigo is half-lizard and Shuuhei is a living bear trap.

He turns towards Rangiku, and she remembers the first time she saw Shuuhei’s face. Half of it, anyways, with the muzzle on. Dark eyes above an imposing wall of hard plastic and secure strappings, not realizing that the purpose was more to keep everyone else out than to keep something in. The first time she saw him without the muzzle, he had black blood and bits of shredded hollow staining his teeth a shiny, streaked silver and his concerned eyes helping her to her feet didn’t match the monster side bare inches below.

Shuuhei speaks up, and she’s grateful. His voice sounds sincere and real and human, and Rangiku remembers how much she likes him when he asks, “What the fuck was Izuru talking about with me and Renji back there?”

Rangiku wishes she knew. She wishes she knew what Izuru’s real deal with Renji was, but Izuru has always been tight-lipped about his past before the Church and before she-knows-who, even to her.

She can make some educated guesses though.

A shrug covers up her suspicions, but the non-chalantness she’d usually use to gloss over an exchange like this feels much more transparent after having snapped at all three of her rag-tag companions. “You’re obviously super close to the big guy. Some people could get certain impressions.” Rangiku scratches her shirt over her belly and enjoys the way the fabric catches on her short nails, finding some of her humor returning to her when she thinks of afternoons spent running around with the Abarai-Hisagi tag team.

But the glare Shuuhei gives her is almost comically frigid, and she can’t help pulling her lips up in a smug smirk for response. “That’s not funny.” Oh, the poor dear is sincere.

Her brows rise, almost incredulously. “If you say so.”

“If Renji felt that way, I would know.” Shuuhei says, and taps a finger against his own chest as if to reference his half of the soul they both share. “Besides, Witches don’t do that. Its taboo.” And she’s not sure which account she’s more dubious of.

Rangiku has to bite her lip before it becomes obvious she’s not taking his claims seriously. “So you’ve never gotten the impression that-”

“I would know.”

Well, that’s that. Rangiku folds her arms over her stomach, and follows Shuuhei’s eyes to Izuru. Prophet in question was given explicit instructions not to touch anything, so there’s about a ninety-nine percent chance Izuru will willfully disobey.

The dark wraith-like figure that is Izuru is joined by Rose, who bounds over with elegant, slightly oversized suit moving fluidly up to the grave. Rangiku can barely make out the glint of the engraving between Izuru’s blue light and the orange flames pouring from Rose’s skull:

GIN ICHIMARU

PROPHET OF THE POWERS THAT BE. BLESSED BY THE GODDESS OF LIGHT

She wonders if she ought to join their vigil, maybe reflect for a while. But its nothing she wouldn’t have spent time on before, working it back and forth through her head. The child she knew versus the man she came to resent, the ring on his wiry finger that will be etched into his slab- the symbol of a serpent with it’s jaw wide open, a bird’s head appearing from within it’s throat.

“Maybe Izuru doesn’t know.” Rangiku concedes, but her mind has already wandered away from that conversation. Izuru and Renji’s jealous, possessive souls, and Shuuhei somewhere adrift between them. “It means a lot to him that you came down here with us. He doesn’t act like it, but it does.”

Shuuhei doesn’t have much in the way of a response to that. His hands push down inside his jacket. “How long have we been down here?”

Judging by the emptiness of Rangiku’s stomach, probably a while. Funny, how time flies so quickly and you forget about meals when placed into sudden emotionally charged mystery. “You’re thinking that Renji must be looking for us by now.” The grunt she receives as a response confirms.

Izuru and Rose remain front of the grave. She can see the slight bob of Rose’s shoulders when he talks, the motions that accompany his half of the dialogue, so one could assue that Izuru is keeping up conversation. Nothing disastrous has happened here yet, and Rangiku is fine with it staying that way. There’s no person she’d like to see make a comeback from the dead A La Rose style less than the person in that particular grave.

… Which does bring up the question of what exactly they’re going to do with Rose when they leave, but one step at a time.

Their conversation stutters when Rangiku approaches, Rose looking over his shoulder in a way that should not be biologically possible except for sans muscle and joints. Rangiku taps Izuru on the shoulder with one finger. “When do you wanna get out of here?”

He twists his body around to look at her, momentarily all big-eyes and unsure parting of the lips as he realizes he needs to make a decision before the years of practiced calm and control slide back onto his features. Izuru brushes off her touch without even moving, dodging her hand. “Now, I suppose. We’ve found what we were looking for, more or less. Or at least everything we’re going to find.”

Which really wasn’t much. They found knowledge, one could suppose, but Rangiku wouldn’t figure any of it was very useful. This trip has been one pretty stupendous bust compared to what she was hoping for.

Rose happily chatters to them as the three explorers make their way back to the door to the tomb, seemingly relieved to no longer be pinned down by the distressing topic of the student who betrayed him. He’s moved on to discussing fun times with dead friends that he has connected with since initially departing from his mortal coil. “-Oh, back when Witch colonies were a thing Shinji got me into all of the good rituals, let me tell you! The festivals they had, I didn’t get a wink of sleep for weeks afterwards because of the night terrors. Best wedding I had ever been to!” Rangiku admires his zest for life.

Her interest in his story is only distracted by the introduction of a new stimulus- something wet and cold that strikes against her scalp. Always a good sign.

Rangiku runs her hand over her head, finding something sticky in her hair and pulling it away to find black stain on her fingers. It smells earthy, like crude oil as it dribbles over her palm and down her wrist. She looks upwards to the ceiling, and wonders how likely it could be that these old walls might leak from the sewage lines.

“Izuru, did you touch anything back there at Gin’s grave?”

The look Izuru gives her is one that could gently strip paint off of drywall, flat and perhaps slightly offended. “You mean after I was very expressly told not to touch anything because it could set off a magical sodium reaction in a spiritually possessed paper mache volcano? The one thing that I was explicitly advised again. Did I do that thing you’re talking about.”

“Just checking.” She looks up to the dark dome of the ceiling. “Gin is as much of a dick as we remember.”

There’s a sharp, sticky ‘tap’ ahead of them, the black liquid striking the floor. Then a descending. A sudden drop of fluid that escalates into a downpour, collecting in shiny puddles across the tiles that clump together and writhe into semi-solid shapes.

One moves towards their feet, a moon-shaped glob that rolls across the tiles and stretches out to reach for Shuuhei’s boot. Rangiku’s foot moves on instinct, kicking it across the room where it leaves a damp smear on the stones. Glassy little beads of red rise to the surface of the oily material, glaring at her hatefully. The globs cease being globs, and the tangles of snakes surround them on every side. Rangiku takes a moment away from herself to bemoan Gin’s choice and method of curses. Thematic and dramatic, even from beyond the grave. No wonder he and Rose grinded each other’s gears.

A pink, gummy mouth opens up dangerously close to Izuru’s leg, revealing enormous fangs bracketing the abyss of hollow mouth, reeling backwards for an attack. That mouth goes flying as Rangiku’s sword removes head from body, blood spraying and speckling the growing mass of reptilian bodies. Shuuhei’s boot crushes another nearby with the heel making a sick, squishing sound against the head. There’s a severely unhappy twanging noise that sounds suspiciously like Rose whacking a snake away with his guitar like a baseball bat.

It becomes time for Rangiku to reassess her goals, first of LL is for everyone to escape this even shittier-than-expected escapade. To keep everyone alive, as a knight heroically should. As a friend should. As someone who’s supposed to be serving the common greater good should, which means everyone has to survive and make it back to the surface as unscathed as possible.

Her mind snaps into a dark place, one that echoes familiar, and she remembers not everyone. You can’t save them all, all of the time.

“Move back to the exit!” Rangiku’s voice sounds like a distant roar in her ear, rumbling like thunder. Ears and eyes and every sense in her body strains to keep track of everyone’s location, the way the crowd shifts as they are pushed backwards. “I can buy you some time!”

She can feel Shuuhei’s hand on her shoulder before it reaches, fingers tugging but not hard enough to disengage her from a battle stance rooting her to the floor. “No, you’re not. Come on-” But his voice is cut when she reaches back to shove him off, looking Izuru straight in the eyes and mustering as much icy fury she can.

“Get him out of here!” Because Izuru has to know. He’s not destined to die down here today. His fate is not his own and by those principles he must obey the demand to survive-

But his eyes are wide and empty with fear, fear for her and maybe even of her. Rangiku the Blood Knight. Rangiku the Prophet-Killer, locking herself away to die in the grave of the man she betrayed, like something out of a legend. Like fate. He looks at her with the expression of a man drained of life and blood.

As a last-ditch effort Rangiku turns her electric eyes and her snarl to Rose, who is wiser than all three of them. “Help me!”

And he knows about fate, she can see it in his glowing eyes and the click of his jaw as it snaps tightly shut. Bony fingers wrap around Izuru’s collar and yank. Evidently, Rose has a lot of strength in those old bones because Izuru all but is lifted off of his feet when dragged towards the door, even as he blinks himself back into awareness and trials to struggle. “No, stop-” But she turns on her heels and bodyslams Shuuhei into Izuru with as much force as she can muster, not for the first time extremely grateful that Shuuhei’s super-human strength doesn’t translate into super-human weight, and the two of them stumble backwards with Rose pulling them out into the corridor.

Now, Rangiku has a tomb full of snakes, a big-ass sword in her hands, and a repetitive little voice in her head that screams for blood where most people have common sense, and if Gin wants her he can come and get her.

And then its the same old skirmish she’s used to, the glint of whirling steel against flashing teeth, and the only difference is she doesn’t look into the super-nova blue of their eyes the way that she looked into his. Blood soaks into her sneakers, sticky and slick and reptilian-cold.

Her sword slashes through a slew of flesh with a wet, cleaving sound, and it rings in her brain like the blood boiling in her brain. It echoes and reverbs and rearranged into words. Snickt. Why didn’t you stop him? Shnick. You could have changed him. Shlorp. Now you’re going to die here, because the shiny, ropey smatters of monsters on the rocks are starting to pile up on top of each other, writhing and tying themselves into twisted knots. They undulate like ocean waves, crashing down pushing Rangiku off of her feet.

You never let an enemy get you off of your feet. If you went down to the taverns where every Knight spent their evening, meandered around the bulletin boards outside the Cohorts’ office to chat up any monster hunter, slayer, and brawler in a thousand foot radius and asked them what to do if an opponent knocked you off of your feet and onto your back, their immediate response would be to pick a god and say last rites. This rolls around in Rangiku’s head just before ivory fangs the size of her middle finger slice into her flesh and thoughts explode into vibrant shock-waves of pain. Blood soaks her sock and her sneakers, puddling on the floor, and stabbing the monster through the skull is certainly a distraction but doesn’t put any more liquid back in her body.

And then they’re all over her like vines, brambles, swarming over her skin and her face and her eyes. Rangiku is so, so angry. Too angry to be tired. Too angry for death, even as a pale underbelly blocks her vision and the chorus of hissing swallows the outside world whole. She’s too angry to keep living with this burden.

Something pulls at her leg, the one that’s had muscles torn to bits and she knows- Rangiku knows that she’s going to get ripped to pieces. From one torn stitch, tearing up her leg and opening her belly and Gin will finally have her where he wanted her, unmoving and trapped and loyally lying at his feet. The force increases to a yank, like its trying to rip her apart and she screams for him to stop.

And then the swarm chips away. Air, though still rank and moldy, is on her face without the sliding scales to obstruct it and Rangiku gasps it in greedily, the breeze brushing over her face. What breeze could be all the way down here?

She’s free enough to sit up, though her sword is still buried underneath the fray, scrambling to peel of the knots of slithering bodies from on top of her and throw them to the floor. A hand dives down from above, and grabs another plasmic serpent by the throat to cast aside, a blood-stained palm identifying that the person who had been tugging on her torn shin was Shuuhei.

“Hey!” Rangiku barks, not yet decided on whether she’s pissed at him for not getting out of dodge when she told him to. But for now she’ll settle for grabbing his sleeve to hoist herself up to stand on her good foot, waiting for the other one to feel something that isn’t numbness or striking pain.

Shuuhei sees her, and the relief in his eyes of course juxtapositions the fixed ghastly grimace. Its cut short by the tight hold of a snake wrapping its body around his calf and bearing it’s teeth, and Rangiku leans all her weight on Shuuhei so she can give the creature a kick to the skull, remembering that they’re still surrounded.

“I told you to get out!”

He shrugs helplessly at her, “You’re not the boss of me.” Obviously. Thanks, man.

At least Izuru and Rose are gone, vanished from the doorway even as more serpents drip from above and pour into the hallway. And Rangiku doesn’t have to ponder how wrecked everything is going to be if this curse manages to break through to the surface, putting people in danger. Not to mention blowing their cover out of the water. Basically they’re very, extremely fucked.

Of all places to get killed of course its under a Church, so at least the Ash Goddess will be able to find her soul. Rangiku’s lifeforce will burn away into soot and cinders for her Goddess to collect, and hold in their urn with all the other warriors who have died in battle. Maybe they’’ll even take Shuuhei’s soul, too, so he won’t be lost down here. But Shuuhei is already dead, isn’t he? He’s a part of Renji’s soul, now, so what will happen to Renji when Shuuhei dies?

Shit. No one’s gonna know that they’re down here. Ichigo will probably know something’s up when Rangiku doesn’t come back to the Cohorts, but he’s sworn to secrecy and she never told him who they needed to get in contact with if one or more of their party died. She won’t be around to keep an eye on Izuru, help him out with all the micromanaging he tries to do on his own but can’t. Maybe she should have prayed before doing something completely stupid like everything that led her down here.

The wind is on her back, between her shoulders and scraping the edge of it’s teeth and claws over her skin, pulling at her clothes and her hair. Its like it was in the corridor, a sudden burst pushing aside the aridness of these stuffy tombs. It still roars. It still echoes. Is this a sign? Maybe from the Ash Goddess themselves, coming to take Rangiku’s burned-out heart and put it to rest. At this point, almost anything is possible.

Shuuhei grabs her wrist, hanging on with a steel grip despite Rangiku’s immediate instinct to throw him off. The wind muffles her thoughts, howling in her ears and battering down Shuuhei’s voice so she can’t even hear what he’s saying through the vortex of air and dirt that encompasses them. The snakes skate across the floor, light and weightless as scraps of paper in the windstorm. Rangiku feels her feet leave the ground, suddenly boundless.

Alarm crawls over Shuuhei’s face, spine stiffening. His free hand dives into his pocket to pull out the shattered pendant they had found earlier, but as he takes it out his fingers twitch and he almost drops it. Like its become very, very cold. It dangles from the thin chain, completely still as if immune from the air currents and bluster around it all except for the center piece on the wire. The disk spins and twirls into a bronzy bubble to match the speeds of roaring winds around them.

Air tears at Rangiku’s eyes, making them water, scattering dirt in her face and hair. Only her toes still grip at the floor with the edges of her shoes skating over stone tiles. She opens her mouth to speak and tell Shuuhei to get rid of that thing, do anything that might make this all stop and the world go still. Nothing is ever still. The winds just rip her voice away and Rangiku wants to cover her ears with her hands and scream and scream and never stop.

And then the whirlwind does not so much stop as much as it freezes. She feels space go weightless and shapeless and still around her, still suspended from the ground.

There ceases to be anything but quiet.

Optimistically, Rangiku cracks open one eye. That motion itself seems as if it’s fighting against some anti-gravitational force trying to push her inside the limits of her own body. She lifts her hands to check that she is still here and able to move, and its as if she’s moving under water.

“Shuuhei?” For a moment Rangiku is afraid that she’s the only one who is unfrozen, looking over and expecting to see Shuuhei still caught in their moment of confusion and panic and chaos, but he blinks slowly at her as they process together what is happening. The pendent in his hand as stopped spinning entirely. Shuuhei’s eyes are wide, Rangiku can see their whites standing out against his dark skin and the dark walls, but narrowed with scavenger-like beady intelligence, suspicious and prepared to fight.

Shuuhei retracts his arms to observe his own movements, and watching him move is like watching a hologram. It honestly makes Rangiku dizzy. “These are… like Kira’s powers.”

He’s correct. Rangiku supposes that for as long as she’s known the kid, she hasn’t needed his world-bending abilities very often. “He must have turned the gravity off so we wouldn’t get blown away by that wind.” That boy, turning off the laws of physics willy-nilly. ‘Paths of fate’ Rangiku’s shapely ass.

Then again, this may have been detrimental to their experience of not dying. Rangiku gazes up towards the domed ceiling and if she squints she thinks she can see the remnants of Gin’s curse happily swimming through the air and doing doop-de-loops . At least someone is happy. For now, since this effect can’t last forever, and Rangiku’s interest in staying here dwindles ever further watching the oily shapes clump together as the bob against the walls.

Speaking of which, Rangiku is reminded that a certain someone is missing. Neither Izuru or Rose can be seen at the entryway. This provided a conundrum, as since Rangiku isn’t going to die, her next most immediate concern should be that Izuru doesn’t have the opportunity to die either. “Y’think they went up without us?”

“Seems likely.” Shuuhei agrees as he wobbles mid-air. He waves the pendent around, though it swings as if its much heavier than it is in the magic-laden space, and the copper glints at her almost tauntingly. “What about this thing? On a scale of one to weird coincidence, what do you think it had to do with that random dust devil?”

Rangiku knows that as far as magic is concerned the answer is almost always zero. “Toss it. For all we know it could be cursed and end up killing someone. In the meantime-” Well, well, well, look who’s come crawling back? Rangiku’s sword bobs around over the floor, not unlike a forlorn piece of driftwood caught in a slow-moving current.

The acrobatics that brought Rangiku’s sword back into the possession of Rangiku do not need to be gone into, but for the sake of clarity it should be noted that three important things were used. The first was years of advanced gymnastics training that made Rangiku the top warrior she is today. The second is hard work to not let the absence of gravity hold you back. And the third is Shuuhei, who played the role of a springboard.

“Ow.” Shuuhei informs Rangiku, rubbing a dusty sneaker-print off of his jacket. Rangiku can’t really pay attention right now because she’s regaining her spacial awareness, somersaulting through the absence of time and space with her trusty weapon back in her clutches. Yes, now they are in business again. Rangiku digs the edge of the sword into the tile, pushing off and paddling her way back to Shuuhei one awkward and inefficient motion at a time.

“This is so stupid.” Shuuhei grumbles and clings to Rangiku’s waist as she rolls out her shoulders and starts the long push and pull towards the entrance.

Its hard to say exactly what the range is on Izuru’s unreality powers, as it is in the nature of them to skirt around all logic and rationality. But Rangiku can confirm that by the time she reaches the entrance of the tomb she is far heavier with sweat than when she began the journey. Not sure how gross she is from this entire day versus the past half an hour or so. How long have they even been down here? The inside of her shirt is definitely starting to smell kinda funky. The flood on her leg is getting dry and gross.

But once her blade crosses the threshold the change occurs almost immediately. Gravity sets back in, as if it’s vine creeping up the flat of her sword, and by the time they make it back into the hall both Rangiku and Shuuhei are landing feet-first on shaky knees.

Rangiku allows herself one moment to breathe, arms out so she can get a sense of balance again and not immediately fall on her face. She would like very much to sprint off into the darkness now and get back to work, but settles for dropping her backpack off her shoulders. “Get out the medical tape.”

Once she’s all wrapped up, its a dead limp down the hall but she still makes surprisingly good speed. Legs are for suckers.

“Wait- Rangiku!” Shuuhei calls after her, and it takes a severe amount of concentration for Rangiku not to veer into the wall. Magic really fucks you up.

“What?”

“You think he went all the way back up without us?” Shuuhei asks, jogging to catch up to Rangiku. Inhumans, man. Those motherfuckers just bounce back. Curse her weak human body.

She almost answers but catches herself- Izuru’s nature is both loyal and complex. As a loner, it makes sense for him to expect that they’ll catch up on their own. But as the man she knows-

“I think he’s somewhere around here.” Rangiku decides, and turns to continue down the path. She hears a belligerent mumble from Shuuhei, a voice on that hairpin precipice between disbelief and hope, and the sound of his boots running after her.

They don’t have to go very far back up the rows and rows of age-riddled tombs. They don’t have to go very far back up because they start finding the bones. Not bones like the ones that one would think to be down here, gray and brown and riddled with partial decomposition and age, but the preserved pearly white of a carefully in-tact skeleton. They reek faintly of embalming fluid. Toes and tingerbones dropped like shiny pebbles and gradually working up to rib bones, bits of spinal cord. Rangiku has that eerie sense of worry gnawing at her throat again.

They find Izuru, and then they find the pile of Rose’s remaining bones. The former is hunched over, leaning over an opened tomb with the stone lid cracked and ajar on the floor. Izuru’s thin hands look red and chewed up from handling the large rock. Rose stands beside him, looking about as apologetic as a skeleton can appear, gesturing with sleeves that contain no hands as if in remorse for being unable to help.

Rose senses their approach, skull twisting around in a way that still makes Rangiku’s neck hurt to watch. He waves gracefully with his sleeves, and Rangiku can’t help but notice that his finely detailed suit that was already looking a little sad without flesh to fill it is looking baggier around the midsection where his ribs must have fallen out to scatter around the floor.

“Hey.” Rangiku’s shoes scuff as her sprint grinds to a halt. “What’s going on?”

“Rose needs a new grave.” Izuru explains, rubbing grit and traces of blood off on his dark shirt. It blends in easily against the fabric, a black hole for stains and evidence. “He said this one would be fine.”

“I really must apologize that I won’t be able to accompany your group much farther. But as you can see, these old bones weren’t meant for rattling around all day.” The pointed toe of Rose’s shoe scraped some of his spinal chord into a manageable pile. “Shame, I’ll admit. It would be interesting to see the surface world again all this time- or the parts of it I didn’t get to see via Prophetic powers. Run around at the beach, see if my usual record store still sells vinyl.”

“So you’re just- gonna be completely dead now?”

“‘Dead to completion’ as it were?” There’s grating laughter in his tone. “Yes, very much so. I’m looking forward to it, actually. I have a lot of friends long-passed who I’m eager to catch up with. My experiences have been extremely exciting in both life and afterlife. They’ll make great stories, and I fully intend to drive them wild with jealousy.”

It strikes Rangiku as a bit of a downgrade, going from an illustrious coffin in a sacred Prophet’s tomb to a shared grave in these miserable catacombs. Her eyes scan these shelves, and see only tragedy.

But on the other hand, Rose will be dead. She can see how it might cease to matter.

Still, the spirit catches her uncertain gaze. Rose’s jaw clicks. “Trust me- after sharing a tomb so long with Gin, this burial will be a dream vacation, I think it should make sense that I’m laid to rest with all of his other victims as well. Now, Izuru-”

His wrist lands on Izuru’s shoulder, drawing the Prophet’s blue eyes back up wide and alert. Rangiku knows he’s easily startled by such attention, such enthusiasm being radiated right into his face, and Rose plugs right along with considerate urgency. “You must remember what I told you. This job may be your fate but it cannot be your life. Do not think you can do this on your own, or that you can use it to avoid everything else. Share your weight with others, take on their burdens when you can, and throw out everything Gin left behind because its an eyesore and I can’t have my Cathedral disrespected like that anymore.”

That being said, Rose crouches down onto his haunches. The remaining bones in his legs and lower back crack loudly in a thunderous shake. He rolls across the floor to tuck himself into the open grave, barely making the tight squeeze with his lanky frame.

Two suit-sleeves tentatively prod around the floor and walls, before finding the lid of the grave. It grinds against the floor noisily as Rose drags it towards his new resting place, carefully fitting it like a puzzle piece and sealing himself away.

Rangiku, Shuuhei, and Izuru offer their goodbyes and well-wishes. From inside and sounding as if spoken through a mouthful of cotton, Rose’s heavy timbre bids them farewell with an earnest, “Goodnight, my friends.” As if he were tucking in to go to sleep.

Its a long and weird and pretty quiet walk back up to the Cathedral.

-

The way back is longer than the way down, since Shuuhei can’t fall down another hole that will bring them up to the surface quicker. They pass under the gaping pit that they jumped down through and Rangiku makes a vehement argument as to why Izuru should anti-gravity them back up, since Rangiku’s speed is hampered by Shuuhei’s terrible first-aid skills. He refuses at first, but gets tired of arguing and thus a rather risky-looking staircase made out of the debris is constructed.

In time, it all comes back to her. The fresh air and the smell of the streets, things Rangiku had forgotten she was deprived of since the journey down below. Izuru’s head is heavy on her shoulder, leaning as he walks like a half-asleep child being guided home. Shuuhei’s arm is linked with Izuru’s on his other side, all but dragging the rest of his weight.

“So… I guess we kinda did it, right?” Shuuhei suggests. “The thing we went down here to do in the first place that we didn’t know what to do?”

“I mean… yes?” Rangiku really can’t be sure, so she shakes Izuru at her side. “It doesn’t feel like we accomplished much, did we?”

Izuru stirs somewhat. His shoes grind against the floor with every step, possibly more efficient at sweeping up gross debris and putting a hole in his toes than as movements for walking. He yawns once, a puff of air that stirs the hair hanging around Rangiku’s ear before he stifles it. “We did uncover some truths about the Church. and the fate of my- of two of my predecessors. We learned something about the victims of the Witch Hunts, all evidence of which was thought to be erased from the world so we can finally do the memory of those who were killed some justice. Or something.” Izuru’s head lolls, voice sounding as if he’s barely keeping his eyes open at this point. “Hisagi found a weird necklace that did a wind thing.”

“Oh yeah. The thing.” Rangiku’s tongue clicks against the side of her teeth. “You never got rid of that thing, did you?”

She’s positive that Shuuhei would be sulking if his mouth was able to move like that. Even so, his eyes look away from her all guilty. “Yes I did.”

“You most certainly did not. I know. I’ve been with you for the past…. everything that has recently transpired.”

“Its my haunted doodad.” Shuuhei says, and true orneriness makes its way back into his voice. Evidence of his true stubborn nature. “I like it.”

“It could be a gift.” Izuru says, and his voice is now muffled by Rangiku’s shoulder. “Maybe you have a destiny.”

“I sincerely doubt it, but thanks.”

“Its possible.” Izuru shifts to rub his eyes with his sleeves. His face is hidden behind blue fingers that shield his eyes. “You have qualities that could make a God like you. Many of them favor loyalty, strength, bravery, nobleness-” His voice shuts off with a breath.

“You think I’m brave and noble?” Shuuhei asks and a smile slices into his voice, lips curling over teeth and pink gums in a monstrous smirk.

Izuru’s tone grumbles like he already regrets his words. “You came down here with us even though you didn’t have to, didn’t you?” Do Rangiku’s senses betray her? Only if the smoldering heat under Izuru’s skin doesn’t match the smugness oozing off of Shuuhei’s. She is never wrong.

Finally, the monotonous walls and lurching floorways are stopped by a case of stairs, guiding upwards towards familiar wooden cellar doors. A crack of sunlight struggles through the gap, blaring a blinding white. Its still daytime, thank the Gods.

The wood is just as heavy above Rangiku’s hands. But, reassuringly, not ‘heavy as chains replaced to lock three adventurers underground’ heavy. Ichigo must have been good on his word to keep an eye out for them. Rangiku pushes the cellar doors wide open and revels in ntural sunlight hitting her eyes like a two fists to the face. Its the greatest feeling she’s ever experienced. “Hello, world!”

The world does not say hello back, except with flay silence. In fact, even Ichigo seems absent from the area. Rangiku pokes her head out and blinks up at the sky, which looks to be only late afternoon to early evening. The busy avenues of city street traffic bubble and hum in the distance, but its fortunately all clear. Rangiku lends a hand to Shuuhei and then to Izuru before kicking the door closed behind her. The wooden barrier falls shut with a final exhale of dirt and cobwebs, like the satisfied burp of hungry mouth.

“Where’s our look-out?” Shuuhei is the first to say, looking around the tall grass suspiciously as if the other inhuman could pop out any minute.

“I dunno.” Rangiku admits. Honestly, she can’t help but be worried about the kid, too. Its perfectly in Ichigo’s nature to get in over his head while protecting somebody, and she’d rather it not be on her account. But she makes the attempt to convince herself everything is fine. “He might have just gotten called in for something work-related. Not like he could have really reached us down there to let us know.” Rangiku is no expert on mobile technology, but she’s relatively sure that century-old catacomb tunnels aren’t built for cell reception.

Izuru’s are eyes large and curious, and he cuts over the unkempt lawn while collecting snags and burs in his baggy clothing. A finger points towards the noises of street traffic, towards the main road on Cathedral Drive. “What do you think is going on over there?”

“I dunno.” Rangiku huffs and runs her fingers through her hair. “Evening rush? Let’s just lock this shit back up first and then we’ll figure what we wanna do.”

“I think I see your man. The Kurosaki boy.”

Rangiku’s sneakers cut through the grass in stilted, ducking around the solid body of the cathedral to catch the view of the streets from the front. There’s certainly evidence of an early evening rush, but its far more disorderly than the usual bluster of business people and artisans on their way home.

Cathedral Drive is one of the artery streets in town, it makes sense that there should be a lot of traffic going through on weekdays. Forget weekends, when ceremonies and festivities might be held. Now, however, the road looks completely backlogged. The white noise of residents Rangiku imagined heading home after work or going out to dinner looks claustrophobic and clustered, being ushered back away from the Cathedral. Ribbons of yellow warning tape wrap around the lampposts as a sickly yellow gate to warn against crossing over.

Sure enough, Rangiku spots Ichigo immediately, ushering back the crowd with hands held up and Inhuman features tucked away. As she gets closer, she can see the sheen of sweat clinging to his neck and darkening his bright hair from underneath the heavy armor, evidence to attest the fact that he really had been keeping look-out for them all day. In her peripheral vision, Rangiku can catch Chad and Tatsuki guarding a few blocks away. “Hey!”

His suit creaks and pops when he turns to look at her, brows rising over his forehead (not too high, though. The second set of eyes almost pop open.) at Rangiku’s arrival. “You’re back.”

“Yeah. Weird, right?” Rangiku says as she regains her breath, hands on her hips and leaning her weight on her good leg, and looking as inconspicuous as possible, i.e. like she did not just roll out of a crypt. People who look less suspicious and more trustworthy than Rangiku just do not exist. “What’s goin’ on here?”

“We had a… slight emergency.” Ichigo grits his teeth in a grimace, probably recognizing the second he speaks that ‘slight’ and ‘emergency’ don’t really go together in a sentence. “Alright, honestly this shit is pretty weird. Something started crawling out of the storm gutters- I guess from the sewage system.”

Rangiku’s stomach drops to the bottom of her feet. “From the sewage system, you say?”

“Yeah, stuff like-” Ichigo’s mouth stops, eyes flicking behind Rangiku and narrowing. Two flashes of yellow pops out of his face for a bare second, dangerous and reptillian and venomous. “Like that one.”

Her fears are realized, because barely a few feet away where the storm drain opens up a vine like shiny crude oil clings to the brick and bubbles up from below. Gin’s curse breaches the surface of the city, bringing the reek of the sewage from deep below with it. Some of the humans on stand-bye yell, in surprise or disgust. The filmy object splits itself open at the narrow end into a pink maw before the heel of Shuuhei’s boot comes crashing down and splattered it on the pavement.

“I’m getting seriously sick of these things.” He grumbles, fixing the collar on his jacket done up over his face with busy hands like an afterthought.

“I don’t suppose its some wild coincidence that these things are popping up now just right as you guys showed up? That’d be too unlucky.”

“Yeah, fraid not.” Rangiku’s fingers comb through her hair, catching on a disgusting knot of something or other tangled in it. “Don’t worry, they’re not that hard to get rid of. I’ll help you clean ‘em up first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Sure.” Ichigo scuffs the pavement and sighs, belligerent scowl never leaving his face. Though she imagines its a little gentler when pointed at her. “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna rat you out or anything. You’ve always had my back, and I’m not a scumbag.”

“You’re a good boy.” Rangiku agrees with a smile as chipper as she can make it. The sound of Shuuhei complaining as he scrapes sludge off of his boot and Izuru commenting ‘I don’t think that’s coming off’ reminds her of immediate concerns. “I’ll catch up with you soon, I gotta get these guys settled first.”

But how, exactly, does one settle an exhausted Izuru and Shuuhei? They haven’t eaten all day- she hasn’t either, now that she thinks about it. Rangiku’s been running on pure adrenaline from the moment Shuuhei fell through a hole in the floor and nothing else. She should get him home, figure out a way to placate Renji with whatever lie she can fabricate that will work. Her brain runs through the catalogue of what will work on stubborn and defensive Witches as she taps Shuuhei on the elbow. “You ready to head back, champ?”

She can tell by the dirt on his face and the slump to his spine that he is. For a moment he stares at Rangiku like he is still awaiting instruction, like they are still in a dangerous situation and she is the leader by the grace of her history and her skill and her violence, and it kinda creeps her out.

But then it passes. Shuuhei shakes out his shoulders like shaking off water. “Yeah. I think all this spooky stuff is getting to me. I need a bit of the real world.”

Rangiku doesn’t point out that he still has the pendent. It sits like a flat lump, a smooth stone, in his pants pocket. “Let’s get you home.” Her eyes turn to Izuru. “I’ll meet you back here, alright? Help you tie up any loose ends.”

But he’s gone in a fluid motion, reappearing at Rangiku’s side like her shadow. This voice is solid, tight with his own strange kind of nonchalance that covers his obstinance. Like a glass cage around a rampaging bull. “Actually, I think we can wait a bit more. I want to talk to Shuuhei about something.”

“What about Renji?” Rangiku asks, but she keeps the impatience out of her voice. Curiosity prickles at her, but so do those ol’ defensive impulses. Is the risk of putting Izuru in front of an angry Witch really a good idea? The answer is an obvious no. Therefor she shouldn’t be surprised Izuru is going to be an ass about it.

Sure enough, Izuru’s expression is as innocent as can be. As if he can’t believe Rangiku would see a flaw in his plan. He’s full of shit. “I only need him for a minute.” His wounded puppy expression rounds on Shuuhei. “Do you mind that?”

Shuuhei buys into this about as much as Rangiku does, which is to say that some of Izuru’s eccentric charm has worn through. His expression twists and Rangiku can see the edge of his lips turned up in a critical scowl around the corner of his collar.

He’s surly, but oddly enough he’s not distrustful. There’s a cautious patience in his face and in his stature. His eyes look at Izuru, up and down and up again, in an attempt to read him, Rangiku wishes him good luck on that. “No, its fine.”

“Good.”

Rangiku waits, eyeballs rolling from Izuru to Shuuhei expectantly. Izuru, in turn, looks at her, which prompts Shuuhei to look at her as well. Its a big staring party and Rangiku begins to get the idea that she’s not supposed to be in on this conversation. Which, really, does nothing to deflate her curiosity, but so be it.

“I’ll-” Well now hasn’t this gotten awkward. Rangiku’s heels skid as she backs away. “Um. Go check up with the Cohorts and see what the damage is around town. You guys sit tight.” The pinnacle of smoothness. Its a shock Rangiku doesn’t do covert missions, what with her steel wit and lightning-fast recovery and all.

She’s quick to turn on her heels, facing the long shadow of the sun starting to dip down as she ambles down the street. At her back, she can hear Izuru’s voice in his careful, deep tone. “I’m sure that after all this, you probably have some questions…”

Rangiku tents her fingers, and she has questions, too. Curious questions, about why Izuru selected Shuuhei for this mission as opposed to literally anyone else. Granted, his power and history with magic made him a good choice, but she would have never even met the guy to know that if Izuru hadn’t pointed her in Shuuhei and Renji’s direction in the first place. And now Shuuhei was handling this whole other side of his world, full of conspiracy and betrayal. Now he was handling Izuru.

She wonders, but she thinks she knows. She thinks she knows in the way Izuru talked about fate, and the way Shuuhei doesn’t push away like he did before like he expects a sudden knife in his back, a bite out of his shoulder. Rangiku considers change, and sometimes she thinks she knows about the strings of destiny better than even Izuru does.

Rangiku’s throat rumbles in a hum as she stalks down the road. Curiouser, and curiouser.

-

Its not too long before the Cohorts have cleared most of the streets. And since the appearing creatures are not too sensational and mostly just reek and pose a threat to public health, Rangiku doubts that many people will want to mess with them.

Leaves more work for her, which Rangiku is honestly fine with. At least she has time to clear her head on her own, slicing open another creature of the curse. Under layers of sewage and waste, the things are starting to look less animal and more like shapeless blobs, which is another little silver lining. Eventually, she might have started to feel pity for these things.

Rangiku follows the commotion as far as it will take her, though her heart isn’t quite in the slashing and hacking like it was before. She really is too tired, and too hungry, and maybe even a little piece of her is too sad right now. There have been better ways to go through the day than getting slapped across the mouth by an unfortunate and unhappy past. It sits in Rangiku’s belly heavily. It slips under her skin and wears her. When Rangiku’s sneakers are lined across the bottom in sludge, she finally decides to sit down on the curb and have a good old-fashioned stew in her troubled thoughts.

She’s almost ready to doze off just sitting there, elbow propped up against a fire-hydrant. Its not exactly comfortable, but Rangiku has slept on nothing but cold hard dirt and sprang up fighting the next morning. This is the kind of person she is. This is the kind of life she has.

“Excuse me?”

A gentle voice prods her into focus, blinking and looking up and still sort of longing for a nap. “Yeah-”

Rangiku’s irritation dissolves when she sees who she is talking to- a young woman smiling politely and looking sincerely apologetic for interrupting Rangiku’s space-out time. As a rule, a Knight always tries to be chivalrous to nice girls. And Rangiku also tries to always be chivalrous to nice girls, which is more important. “Sorry. Yes?”

The woman folds her hands over her chest, a quirky little old-fashioned gesture to match her quirky old-fashioned black dress and gemstone barrette. If this were a period historical drama, Rangiku would assume she just stepped out of the early 1900’s. But because this is not a historical drama, she can only assume its some counter-culture style what that all those young people are into and such.

“I don’t mean to bother you, but could I borrow that?” She points a square-cut nail at the fire hydrant.

Rangiku doesn’t even question it. She scoots her ass a little bit away from the hydrate. The girl motions and says apologetically, “Just a little more, sorry- there, that’s perfect!” She skitters up to the curve and pulls a stick of chalk out of her sleeve. The chalk drags over the hydrant painted surface with a grinding noise.

Then there’s a fluid motion, a flapping of sleeves from the girl as traces of smoke seem to dance off of her hair and fingertips in charcoal wisps. The smell of sulfur and burning leaves sinks into the air, and with one flick of the wrist the top comes exploding off of the fire hydrant. It flips high into the sky in a spray of bursting water.

The girl’s fingers play with the air like an orchestra conductor, guiding the water to pour down the street and around the corner and like an obedient dog it follows her instructions, disappearing down the crosswalk.

Impressive control. True, Rangiku didn’t quite escape getting splashed by the sudden geyser, but now she’s not only dirty but also wet. “You-”

“Again, super sorry, Miss!” The girl calls over the rushing water, her shiny buckled shoes clacking on the sidewalk, bone dry, as she follows the flow. She waves goodbye, and the improvised flood plorps into the sky as if to mimic.

“Wait-”

Rangiku follows the girl and her stolen water around that corner, feet instantly soaked and cut freezing to the bone but as long as she has something new to stick her nose in Rangiku’s exhaustion is a problem for later.

Her eyes catch the girl’s back, still using the controlled, staccato motions of her hands to direct the water as she approaches a group of individuals gathered around a cul-de-sac where the road hits a dead ends.

She can see several of the curse’s creatures, larger and lumpier and with the appearance and consistency of tar, cornered by the strangers. The crowd moves like a wave, like a hive mind and the tiles of pavement rise like a wall to push the creatures further back. The odor of sulfur permeates the air like thick perfume, mixed in with other smells of earth and fire and magic.

“Watch your feet!” The girl from earlier warns, and the water from the hydrant goes crashing into the creatures and lifting them off the ground. The writhing shapes wash away like debris straight into the storm gutters, tons upon tons of pressurised water raining down after them.

“Nice thinking, Momo!” A cheer goes up from the crowd.

“No accolades yet. We managed to get rid of the problem, but destroying this infestation is going to be a different matter.”

“Yes? well I don’t really think a city-wide infestation is gonna be something we can clean up over an evening siesta, even if we wanted to. This is going to take some problem-solving.”

“Yumichika is right, Nanao. We can’t keep this up all night, clearing the streets is a good first step. We can’t afford to be out here all night.”

The Witches begin to pack in, some returning vials and spell bags to their pockets, and Rangiku gets the idea that she’s made a tragic mistake when she sees a familiar flash of red hair that matches a familiar expression turning towards her.

“Rangiku?”

His inflection is high, surprised. Maybe even relieved. But the bare second passes and Rangiku is struck with a glare of suspicion that batters into her. And she knows, the day can only keep going uphill from here.

Well, what’s that over there? A reason to leave? No? Good enough. Rangiku disappears, back-tracking around the corner in what absolutely has to be the worst attempt at pretending not to have made eye-contact with a person in the history of ever. And even as Rangiku makes a silent plea to every God she knows that be some wild chance Renji will not follow her, she can hear his yelling catch up to her. The electric popping of magic as his gawky, broad shape rises out of the ground in geyser of liquid dark. His tattoos arch across his face like a nervous tick, and his shirt is stained with tar. “Rangiku!”

She’s forced to stop. Rangiku reminds herself that danger is over and to switch off the impulse to swing first because that’s honestly the last thing she needs right now. “Before you ask- Shuuhei is fine.”

Rangiku hoped that would draw an emotional response from him. Preferably not rage. And it appears she lucked out. Renji’s eyes cool down, losing some of that fatal shine to them that usually accompanies a shattering or a small explosion. His jaw tightens, tense but mostly worried. He’s not angry, but anxiety is chewing him up and that’s close enough.

“Where have you been all day? I know you took him with you.” Renji’s fingers comb through his hair, tugging on his ponytail hard enough to disengage a few long, shaggy strands in frustration. His teeth are a gnashing wall behind scowling lips. “Do you have any idea how much I’ve been losing my mind trying to reach you guys all day? Shuuhei’s not letting me use him to Witch Way, you guys were just gone-”

Gods. What is he, their mother? Rangiku resists the urge to say something sassy, which is an impressive feat by any and all means. “Look, he’s okay. I can already tell you’re at a ten, and I’m gonna need you to take it down to a five.”

Renji rolls his shoulders back, looking down his nose at Rangiku in a way that might be threatening if she couldn't bench-press him. Plus she’s seen what he looks like in the morning. “Where is he?”

Rangiku refuses to budge, arms folded across her chest and a growl written on her lips. “You’re not listening to me.”

“And you don’t understand.” His eyes flicker off of her, a heat haze, and she can see where the go. Over her head, over the rooftops. To make contact with the four spirals reaching into the sky, and Raniku can see it in his eyes. Its not that Renji didn’t know it would happen, its what he didn’t want to know.

She’s about to warn him about proceeding to make decisions with extreme caution, Abarai, because she’s had it up to here with supernatural bullshit today and her tolerance for shenanigans has hit rock bottom but somehow kept on drilling. But he doesn’t give her the chance. He’s smoke and sparks and black lightning bouncing off the fronts of buildings, pinballing his way to Cathedral Drive.

And Rangiku needs to take a knee for a minute and debate the pros and cons of taking that nap in the gutter before bolting right off after him and disengaging whatever needs to be disengaged.

And later she’ll find out what the scene was like when Renji showed up out of thin air. About Izuru’s hand that somehow ended up hovering over Shuuhei’s chest from some lack of restraint- something that Izuru thought had been dormant inside of him for half a decade that took back control. About how Renji saw that and relived a memory that should have stayed buried. And about how Shuuhei is possibly the least lucky man in the universe, but that part she already knew.

But she does get there in time to watch, Shuuhei pushing Renji back, using his wiry frame as best he can as a wall. Not specifically just blocking Renji from Izuru, but locking Renji from escape and from distraction. “Hey! Look at me!”

Rangiku is at Izuru’s side in an instant, though he seems entirely unscathed. How long the boy can stay that way is always a gamble. Izuru’s fists tighten at his sides, lips flattened to a deep frown that she can only read as a sneer.

“Where the hell were you all day? I had no idea what was going on!” Renji complies with Shuuhei’s demand, but his gaze keeps wandering over Shuuhei’s head towards the true object of his anger, his betrayal.

“Well, I wasn’t dead in a ditch, so I feel like you’re not looking at the upside here.” Shuuhei growls and the edge in his voice could cut glass. His collar is turned down, meeting Renji face-to-face. Not as a threat, even with all those nasty teeth exposed, but to level the playing field. “Rangiku and Kira had a job they wanted my help in, and I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d be a huge brat about it just like you’re being right now!” Shuuhei’s voice doesn’t even rise, it sounds like he’s scolding Renji. Or like this is one of their back-and-forth banters, even as Renji’s eyes pop inside his skull.

Renji’s lip curls in a wide grimace, hands skating through his hair and over his face and Rangiku can hear the quiet ‘crack’ of the nearest lamppost breaking, hairline fractures etching into the glass. “Shuuhei, this is not okay!”

Izuru opens his mouth, which is generally considered a bad idea, and his voice makes the hair on the back of Rangiku’s neck rise. His eyes are icy slits, and they’re tight with fury. “Yes, I’m sure you were so worried. Who knows what might happen to him if I get my hands on him, right?”

“Izuru-” Rangiku tries to interject because honestly that might not be the best defense when they did just drag Shuuhei into a claustrophobic situation and release a buried curse on the entire city. Now might not be the best time to trot out the ol’ ‘but he’s perfectly fine!’ validation.

Renji’s spine arches like a feral cat, hissing and spitting. “No one asked you! Gods, I’m so sick of you.” Izuru recoils like a blinding light is beaming into his face, upper lip curling and posture stuttering. “Every time something bad happens, you’re right around the corner pulling the strings.”

“No one manipulated me.” Shuuhei argues, and automatically Rangiku’s heart drops into the balls of her feet, because she knows that’s not true. That the only reason that she ‘discovered’ Renji and Shuuhei was because Izuru wanted her to know them. The only reason Rangiku became their friend was to help Izuru, even though that plan went wrong.

Of course she’d do it again. Izuru is her best friend, has been with her and stood by her and when she did some not so very good things he still looked at her like she was an iron wall. Indomitable. And because of that, she was.

But something wriggles around all gross under her skin, crawling over her bones.

“He’s trying to win you over.” Renji seethes, and his voice climbs higher like he’s on the verge of a meltdown. Rangiku feels the ground shift under her feet, stone tiles rattling around like the machine-gun tapping of anxious fingers. Like unsteady breathing. A black film, shiny like beetle shells, slides over Renji’s eyes. It swallows up the pupils and whites until they’re pitch glass orbs.“He wants to take you away from me and use you, like he uses everybody else!”

Rangiku doesn’t look back to see if Izuru cringes.

In the corner of her eye, Rangiku catches the black electricity of Renji’s dark magic. Instantly there’s an all-too close and all-too-sudden ‘pop’, the lamppost finally shattering in an explosion of glass that bounces off the ground and sprinkles on Rangiku’s shoes and socks like a cloud of glitter. Tiny pieces catch in Izuru’s jacket and on Shuuhei’ shair as everyone reacts at once to put their hands up and protects their head.

“Renji, you need to get out of here.” Rangiku tries to summon the authority into her voice again in a way that deters the idea of resisting or hexing. She lowers her hands from the air and hopes to not hear the sound of breaking glass again or feel a stray shard rake across her skin. “You’re too emotional, and someone is gonna get hurt.” At the very least, there will be huge property damage.

Renji starts like he might try to argue, and she feels the surrounding temperature rise a few degrees and sweat stick to her skin. The smell of brimstone and smoke. The shattered glass on the floor catch the dark of eyes and reflect it back like tiny black jewels, and the Witch turns away with a noise of blatant disgust crawling out of his throat.

“I’m going home.” The black film retracts from his eyes, a beady brown glare aimed at Shuuhei goes over Renji’s shoulder. “Come with me or don’t. I don’t care.”

“Of course I’m coming home.” An exasperated breath skates out of Shuuhei’s mouth, gesturing at the air with clawlike hands to Renji’s back like he wants to squeeze the life out of something, feel it pop between his hands. “Renji-”

Shuuhei throws his arms up in the air, the universal sign of ‘just fuck this’ and jogs to catch up to Renji.

Time is halted by Izuru’s voice cutting in, and the tension snaps. Rangiku says a silent blessing that nobody gets killed today, and the of course universe gives her a Prophet.

“Poor Abarai. Everything is about you.” Izuru says to Renji’s back, and his words fall from his lips like iron weights. Like a tower collapsing. “You must hate feeling so jealous. Do you feel like a monster for having feelings for your Familiar?”

Shuuhei’s spine stiffens at the same time that Renji’s shoulders tighten into a hunch, Shuuhei turning around with knitted brows and a deep frown. “What?”

Renji’s arm moves in an arc, jagged lines of energy dancing down his bicep before leaping off of his fingers in a fatal missile that bends in the light..

The spell comes at Izuru with an arrow-like edge, dark magic in it’s most direct and dangerous form, and at once time stops again and the world goes numb. Izuru moves, wrist slashing at the air like pulling an invisible thread and space bends to send the bolt of magic careening off path. It twists like a kite, rocketing through the air and the sky until it strikes the center of the Cathedral wall, exploding in a shower of sparks, and the stained glass window above the Cathedral’s massive doors creaks and crackles. An ugly, unfortunate scar climbs right down the middle. It spiders it’s way across the window, putting lightning-bolt warps in the red and blues and purples.

Time shifts back into place, Izuru’s arm flying back as if recoiling from the force of Renji’s attack, like he’s surprised by what just happened. Renji’s eyes are black again, furious and hot and hateful. His body twitches- a shiver from his neck to his knees like he’s seizing, convulsing with power and anger and magic. His left hand twitches for a second attack.

“Do not-” He barks, and black smoke falls out of his mouth and curls around his teeth like tendrils. “Play games with me.” Renji casts the second spell and Izuru moves to defend himself again, only this time neither of them will get the chance to put the last word in.

They won’t get the chance because Rangiku steps in, standing before Izuru and bracing her sword like a shield against her hand. Her body feels like fire, all reflexes and snapping synapses and she bares the brunt of the hex hitting her blade before the metal gets too hot and she is forced to drop the sword onto the ground where it clangs dully, heavily.

All eyes are down on the weapon, before outrage is clawing at the forefront of Rangiku’s mind and she finds herself balling her fists at Renji. This needs to stop before someone gets hurt.

Shuuhei agrees, his mouth set into a crooked line with teeth peering out of a deep frown. His hand wraps around Renji’s shirt collar and he pulls, and not even Renji’s bulky frame can match Shuuhei’s Inhuman strength or the fuming heat to his snarl. “We need to leave. Now.”

Rangiku is inclined to agree, keeping a careful eye on the two. A warning. She can feel Izuru’s gaze on her back.

Renji’s eyes are on her, too. He still twitches, thrumming and high with power, but his expression evens out and he’s a blank slate with an icy stare. As if still processing what just happened and what he just did.

Shuuhei’s grip on his back rattles him, and Renji snaps up to attention. The twitch in his brow and the twist in his lip return like a mask sliding on, contradicting the bitter and dark look etched into the snarling lines of his Familiar’s face. If Renji was having a rough time keeping secrets from Shuuhei before, its going to be a hell of a time using the told ‘its complicated’ line on him now..  
Hopefully that’s a good thing.

Renji’s tattoos slide over his skin, black lines dripping off of his arms and pooling around his and Shuuhei’s feet. The shadows rise and wrap around their forms like a cocoon, a shell that cuts them off from the rest of the world and from light and from life before sinking into the ground below. There’s a final ‘pop’ as Witch and Familiar vanish into the Witch Way, leaving no other trace behind.

Rangiku waits. She counts to ten, using pulse in her brain as a metronome. And once she gets as far as nine she turns on her heels and rounds on Izuru. “You think that was real fucking smart, don’t you?”

“Maybe in the moment.” Izuru admits, and slides his hands into his pockets. He looks tired and weary and small. Even so, Rangiku knows him well enough to see regret tethered to him like a chain around his neck. He’s all weighed down now.

She walks with him back into the Cathedral, passing under the split moon of the window above the door that is going to take some expert craftsmanship and a good explanation to repair. Up the winding spiral staircase that rattles under Rangiku’s feet. Izuru’s shoes hardly make a sound, this place absorbs him and clings to him like a missing puzzle piece.

When they get up to Izuru’s room, Rangiku fumbles around for a light switch while Izuru stumbles around his own furniture and belongings. Not talking, not looking at her or at anything, and Rangiku can guess what’s going on in his mind, what conversations he’s still playing over and over and over again. He comes to bounce his hip against the armchair and fold into it, tucking knobby knees and long limbs into a spiky ball.

Rangiku gives up on the light. Her feet are so heavy and sore underneath her, they slip out from under her body. She hears the sound of her shirt sliding against the wall as she slumps down, sitting on the solid floor and lets herself be quiet and still and almost alone.

 

When Rangiku wakes up, she’s not sure what time it is. The room is still dark, on account of her never having managed to find that light switch. She stands up on shaky legs that tremble underneath her but don’t ache and strain like they did before, even if her wound is still sor.. Rangiku has a lot of questions; what time is it? How are Renji and Shuuhei doing after that? Why did Rangiku wake up with a memory of a dream on the tip of her brain that sounds like a whisper but just barely human, more like a reptilian hissing. It slides from her mind and she forgets it. Its forgotten.

A growling empty stomach reminds her of priorities, and that she still hasn’t eaten since early this morning. Gotta take care of that.

“Izuru?”

A brief cursory search of the room confirmed what Rangiku could probably already have guessed, and it is that Izuru is fully sound asleep on the floor. Probably rolled right off of the armchair and didn’t even wake up. Rangiku takes a moment to be thankful for Izuru’s wispy form, that even in this kind of state she has no problem scooping him and setting him back in the chair. Reminds her of late nights and bad mornings.

She slides the door closed behind her as she exits the confessional, shoulder braced against the doorframe as she tries to think. Preferably not about anything distressing or annoying which sadly disqualifies a large portion of her life lately, and almost everything trying to invade her brain. Food, though. Food is a good thing, and Izuru will need to eat when he wakes up.

One of the downsides of the Cathedral is that it, of course, was built to house bizarre supernatural recluses such as its dear and beloved Prophet. That doesn’t exactly make finding anyone else lurking around easy, and exploring the echoey hallways and chambers always gives Rangiku the impression that she is stalking some elusive and odd prey. She has to wait until one of Izuru’s little priest underlings wanders into her path.

After enough prowling, a white robe catches her eye ducking around the corner, and Rangiku only has to call them forward with a sharp command of “Clergyman!” to get their attention. Her hand lands on the priestess’s shoulder.

Huge dark eyes blink up at her, startled at being cornered by someone who is clearly not an employee of the Church, if Rangiku’s lax dress code, completely disheveled state, and dried blood were anything to go by. Rangiku probably looks like she just tumbled in off the street to murder someone.

But the second of pure fear passes, and priestess must recognize Rangiku because her face relaxed and lights up with familiarity. Rangiku feels substantially better that her appearance doesn’t outweigh her reputation, and she tries to wrack her brain for a name. “Rukia.”

That’s it. the girl blinks at her, round face dappled with the blue paint that all clergy of Izuru’s chapter wear. Rukia smooths out her white dress, dutiful but perhaps sounding a bit bored. “Sir Knight?”

“Izuru is upstairs in his room resting.” Rangiku explains, jabbing a thumb towards the ceiling. She’s too tired and hungry and unhappy to be polite for someone with such a dreary expression, but she tries not to sound like a bossy asshole. “Do you have something I could bring up for him to eat? Maybe the kitchen has something leftover from dinner? Or breakfast... ” Rangiku has absolutely no idea what time it is.

Rukia pushes bangs behind her ears, “Yes, of course. I think the left-overs are in the pantry, I’ll get something for you.”

Rangiku has only know the girl in passing, but for a long time. Her memory can reel as far back as to when she was working for Gin-

Well. Perhaps that’s why Rangiku never got too familiar with the staff. Not even after Izuru. Chalk that up as another thing to feel shitty about.

Rukia, though. Something’s always off about Rukia. She twists her fingers in one hand, wrist flicking like a twitch. Or a convulsion. Or a spell. And before she turns to guide Rangiku in the direction of the kitchen she throws one questing look over her shoulder to the Knight and asks with a shocking degree of bluntness. “Is the Prophet alright? I mean- is his condition well?”

Rangiku figures that’s an entirely subjective opinion, but answers anyways. “He’ll be fine. He just needs rest now.”

“Do you know when he’ll be rested enough to accept visitors?”

Rangiku arches an eyebrow, cocking her head and letting stringy, sweaty and dirty hair brush over her shoulder. Gods, she needs the longest, hottest bath anyone in the world has ever seen. “Soon, I imagine. Why do you ask?”

“He mentioned recently that he wanted to speak with me in private.” Rukia admits. “Something regarding a transfer. I might be in line for a career change. I’ve been thinking a lot about my old job.”


End file.
